Editing HiTech (section)

===Development and specs===
It was designed by [[Carl Ebeling]], a student, from 1986 to 1988, under professor [[Hans Berliner]] at [[Carnegie Mellon University]].<ref name="A:A"/> Members of the team working on HiTech included Berliner, [[Murray Campbell]], [[Carl Ebeling]], Gordon Goetsch, Andy Palay, and Larry Slomer.<ref name="A:J"/>

Berliner had also created a computer program to play backgammon called BKG 9.8, which beat [[Luigi Villa]] in 1979, and in the process became "the first computer program to beat a world champion in any game." According to the ''New York Times,'' "this research led, in 1984, to a chess program called HiTech."<ref name="A:K">{{Citation |last=Alder |first=Phillip |date=November 4, 2006 |title=The Chess/Bridge Divide, and One Who Crossed Over |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/04/crosswords/bridge/the-chessbridge-divide-and-one-who-crossed-over.html}}</ref> The computer used an algorithm developed by Berliner to narrow the choices when selecting a move, called B*, or B-star. The algorithm would evaluate decision trees and assign nodes with an "optimistic" or "pessimistic" score, with the aim of finding a path that was sufficient to solve the problem, rather than perfect.<ref name="A:I">{{Citation |last=Spice |first=Bryan |date=January 19, 2017 |title=Hans Berliner Was a Pioneer in Computer Chess |publisher=Carnegie Mellon University |url=https://www.cmu.edu/piper/news/archives/2017/january/hans-berliner-obituary.html}}</ref>

HiTech's name refers to a chess-playing program called TECH that was developed at Carnegie Mellon.<ref name="A:J"/>  The team combined a [[Sun Microsystems|Sun]] computer equipped with a custom processor called "the searcher" by Berlin. It runs three programs: a user interface, a task controller, and an "oracle," with the latter consisting of a large catalogue of chess openings and variations. The searcher component contains a microprocessor and a number of hardware modules to perform tasks such as generating and evaluating moves. These activities are coordinated by the microprocessor. The move generator<ref name="A:J"/> consisted of 64 [[VLSI]] chips, with one for each square on the chessboard.<ref name="A:J">{{Citation |last=Dewdney |first=A. K. |date=February 1986 |title=Computer Recreations |publisher=[[Scientific American]] |url=https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/chess/computer-recreations.dewdney-ak.scientific-american.feb-1986.062303022.pdf}}</ref><ref name="A:I"/> In 1988, Hitech could scan 165,000 positions a second.<ref name="A:G"/>

The hardware, which was custom, could analyze over 200,000 moves per second.<ref name="A:A"/> The computer has a nearly six-foot-tall mainframe.<ref name="A:C"/> HiTech was one of two competing [[chess]] projects at Carnegie Mellon; the other was [[ChipTest]].<ref name="atkinson"/> ChipTest became the predecessor of IBM's [[Deep Thought (chess computer)|Deep Thought]] and [[Deep Blue (chess computer)|Deep Blue]]).<ref>{{Cite book
|last=Hsu|first=Feng-hsiung|author-link=Feng-hsiung Hsu
|year=2002
|title=Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion
|publisher=[[Princeton University Press]]
|isbn=0-691-09065-3
}}</ref>