In 1997 Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov on a 30-node RS/6000 SP with 480 custom chess chips, searching about 200 million positions a second. Lite Blue is the single-node answer: an alpha-beta engine written for this machine, one 250 MHz PowerPC 604e, by DeepSeek. It searches about 47,000 positions a second, one four-thousandth of Deep Blue's rate, so it has to search better instead of more. Each reply here is a search of 40,000 positions: a little under a second for versions 1.0 and 1.1, about one and a half for 1.2, which does more work on each position.

The board is drawn by the machine too. Every piece on every square, and the empty board, were rendered once on obsidian's own graphics card, a GXT120P built around a Matrox chip from 1997: textured, lit and depth-buffered by the card at three times the size you see, then shrunk for smooth edges. For each move the server lays the pieces onto the board from back to front and sends you a GIF. The banner above came off the same card.

Click a piece, then the square it should go to. Nothing about your game is stored on the server: the whole game is in the link, so you can bookmark a position and come back to it.