Does computer chess sponsorship exist?

[MikeB]

Is there any record of people ever having received sponsorship for computer chess? I'm a year or so from buying a new server for analysis.sesse.net, and I know Intel (and probably also AMD) has a long tradition of throwing hardware at various people for research, gaming, etc.—but I've never heard of anything in chess. (Producing a CPU has very low marginal cost—all the cost is in R&D and setting up the fabs—so it's fairly cheap for them if they assume they don't lose a sale that way.) Does it exist? Does anyone have contacts in any of those companies that are interested in chess and think it would be interesting to have their name associated with some of the strongest live analysis available?

Basically , once Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the was the beginning of the end. All the interest now is in AI, NN and face recognition. AI and NN, people here will understand , why I say FR? It will eventually replace ID cards, credit cards etc.

[noobpwnftw]

why I say FR? It will eventually replace ID cards, credit cards etc.

I hope I'd live long enough to see Olympics played electronically.

[Sesse]

I hope I'd live long enough to see Olympics played electronically.

Just measure genetics + some physical parameters and decide the winner?

[Peter Berger]

Is there any record of people ever having received sponsorship for computer chess? I'm a year or so from buying a new server for analysis.sesse.net, and I know Intel (and probably also AMD) has a long tradition of throwing hardware at various people for research, gaming, etc.—but I've never heard of anything in chess. (Producing a CPU has very low marginal cost—all the cost is in R&D and setting up the fabs—so it's fairly cheap for them if they assume they don't lose a sale that way.) Does it exist? Does anyone have contacts in any of those companies that are interested in chess and think it would be interesting to have their name associated with some of the strongest live analysis available?

Such sponsorship definitely existed, and you don’t have to look such a long way back as others suggested.
Crafty was most likely sponsored by AMD in Israel 2004. At least its 4*2,4GHz were pretty impressive and +really+ kind of new back then. And the machine was not owned by Bob Hyatt.
And Junior was sponsored by INTEL of course. I don’t remember what they actually ran on right now, but I do remember that it was +really+ new and fancy.
Fritz had ChessBase to provide something fancy.
Someone else mentioned Hydra a few years later, another obvious example for sponsorship.
I think you simply have to +ask+ the guys who matter if you have a project potentially worthy of sponsorship.
And we are talking +sesse+ here, „the Norwegian super computer“ that has been mentioned again and again in all live comments from recent human world championships – PR is guaranteed.
I was really surprised that this is just a private guy who bought and built it. My serious advice is: don’t do this again, For a computer company this is just peanuts – and you have made yourself a name that is worth something.
Peter

[Leo]

According to talkchess posts, Houdini was sponsored by an Arab Sheikh. I don't have any direct knowledge of that.

I thought that was Hydra.

They did that one too.

[Leo]

I hope I'd live long enough to see Olympics played electronically.

Just measure genetics + some physical parameters and decide the winner?

Hilarious. I still say Serena Williams is doing steroids.

[Damir]

Serena looks more like a man than a woman...

[bob]

also when the opteron first came out, AMD provided me access to 4/8 processor machines for some of the ICC events we used to hold. Cray (as someone mentioned) gave us lots of free machine time. CDC used to provide computer time for chess 4.x.. Bell Labs supported Ken and Joe in their development of Belle. IBM did deep blue and used to provide computer time to Berliner (early 70's) and Chaos (late 70's). For a year, Univac provided us access to a dual CPU Univac system. There are probably some I have missed.

For us (blitz/cray blitz), to recap, we were provided machine time by Univac, Cray, DEC (when VAX first came out), and we even had access to a CDC Star but it didn't fit our chess program very well. Used to be a lot of interest. We always had a gallery at supercomputer conferences cheering us on since Cray was THE supercomputer of the 70's, 80's and 90''s.

[bob]

According to talkchess posts, Houdini was sponsored by an Arab Sheikh. I don't have any direct knowledge of that.

I thought that was Hydra.

They did that one too.

Don't think it was Houdini. It was a program by Chrilly Donninger. Houdini has not participated in the usual computer chess tournaments, just TCEC in the last few years it seems.

[Sesse]

I think you simply have to +ask+ the guys who matter if you have a project potentially worthy of sponsorship.

Yeah, the problem is figuring out who the guys who matter is, and how to get their ear

And we are talking +sesse+ here, „the Norwegian super computer“ that has been mentioned again and again in all live comments from recent human world championships – PR is guaranteed.

I always chuckle when I see people calling it a “supercomputer”… Around the time I bought it, NTNU (the university in Trondheim) bought an actual supercomputer, which consisted of a few thousand machines similar to my own, plus a really fast Infiniband network to go with it.