Hydra was a chess machine, designed by a team with Dr. Christian "Chrilly" Donninger, Dr. Ulf Lorenz, GM Christopher Lutz and Muhammad Nasir Ali. Since 2006 the development team consisted only of Donninger and Lutz. Hydra was under the patronage of the PAL Group and Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The goal of the Hydra Project was to dominate the computer chess world, and finally have an accepted victory over humans.
Hydra represented a potentially significant leap in the strength of computer chess. Design team member Lorenz estimates its FIDE equivalent playing strength to be over Elo 3000, and this is in line with its results against Michael Adams and Shredder 8, the former micro-computer chess champion.
Hydra began competing in 2002 and played its last game in June 2006. In June 2009, Christopher Lutz stated that "unfortunately the Hydra project is discontinued." The sponsors decided to end the project.
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Architecture
The Hydra team originally planned to have Hydra appear in four versions: Orthus, Chimera, Scylla and then the final Hydra version – the strongest of them all. The original version of Hydra evolved from an earlier design called Brutus and works in a similar fashion to Deep Blue, utilising large numbers of purpose-designed chips (in this case implemented as a field-programmable gate array or FPGA). In Hydra, there are multiple computers, each with its own FPGA acting as a chess coprocessor. These co-processors enabled Hydra to search enormous numbers of positions per second, making each processor more than ten times faster than an unaided computer.
Hydra ran on a 32-node Intel Xeon with a Xilinx FPGA accelerator card cluster, with a total of 64 gigabytes of RAM. It evaluates about 150,000,000 chess positions per second, roughly the same as the 1997 Deep Blue which defeated Garry Kasparov, but with several times more overall computing power. Whilst FPGAs generally have a lower performance level than ASIC chips, modern-day FPGAs run about as fast as the older ASICs used for Deep Blue. The engine is on average able to evaluate up to a depth of about 18 ply (nine moves by each player), whereas Deep Blue only evaluated to about 12 ply on average. Hydra's search used alpha-beta pruning as well as null-move heuristics.
The Hydra computer was physically located in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, and was usually operated over a high speed optical fiber based network link.
Tournaments and matches
In July 2002, Brutus finished third in the World Computer Chess Championship in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It won six games, drew two games, and lost one, giving it a score of 7 points out of 9. The loss, against Deep Junior, included a rook sacrifice for very long term compensation, which the additional computing power of Brutus could not help it to understand.
In November 2003, Brutus finished fourth in the World Computer Chess Championship in Graz, Austria. It won eight games, lost two games, and drew one, giving it a score of 8½ out of 11. This disappointing result left the team to find a new sponsor, which they found in the form of the PAL group.
In February 2004, Hydra won the 13th IPCCC (International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship) tournament. Hydra scored 6½ out of 7, ahead of Fritz and Shredder.
In April 2004, Hydra finished second in the International CSVN Tournament in Leiden, the Netherlands. It won five games, lost one game, and drew three, leaving it with 6½ points out of 9, 1½ points behind winner Shredder. A loss out of the opening led to the hiring of GM Christopher Lutz, who made a new opening book.
In August 2004, at the 14th Abu Dhabi International Chess Festival, Hydra played an eight-game match against the computer program Shredder 8, a multiple-time world computer chess champion. Running on 16 nodes Hydra defeated Shredder 5½ to 2½, winning three games and drawing the rest. In an informal match at the same tournament, Hydra took on International Grandmaster Evgeny Vladimirov of Kazakhstan, and defeated him by a score of 3½ to ½.
In October 2004, in a man vs. machine contest, Hydra defeated former FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov in both of their games. Ponomariov had an Elo rating of 2710 at the time of the match.
In February 2005, Hydra won the 14th IPCCC (International Paderborn Computer Chess Championships) tournament. Hydra scored 8 points out of 9 (seven wins and two draws), defeating chess program Shredder again in the process.