Deep Blue Costume

Let me set the scene a bit: It's the summer of 1997 and World champion chess player Gary Kasparaov has been beaten in a six game match by two wins to one with three draws . But not by another man. A machine, built by men, has beaten him. IBM's Deep Blue could evaluate up 200 million positions per second, and capable of calculating 11.38 Gigaflops.

In honor of that stunning piece of engineering, I set out to make a suit, that, upon wearing it, I would be transformed into the most logical of logic machines ever built, a chess playing computer!

All that, using just a great big pile of these dinky things:

It is not a perfect replica, by any means; I took many artistic liberties. I was inspired by Deep Blue's portrayal in S2E20 of Futurama, Anthology of Interest. It is rather the stylized idea of Deep Blue, the pop culture impressions of a thinking machine trapped in a big black box.

I used almost exclusively surplus parts to make this thing, so it ended up only costing about 30 dollars. Otherwise though, this costume took quite a bit of work, and erm, it was a bit on the more cumbersome side. But whose else has a mainframe costume? Incidentally, it was so cumbersome that It took me about 15 minutes to shove my way from one side of First Avenue to the other, missing the costume contest registration by just a few minutes. Once there I promptly put it in the coat check so I could breathe.

The frame of the costume is the remains of several cardboard boxes spliced together with duct tape, and the "thinking" lights on the front are controlled by the innards of about 27 little electronic dice, all wired together in a monstrous chain. Another set of lights scrolls back and forth over the speaker grille sorta like KITT, making the AI presence ever clearer. I added a pair of intake/outtake fans so I could breathe ever so slightly better inside, and finally a voice changing box to speak in a robot voice and say great classic things like, "Pitiful creature of meat and bone," and "How about a nice game of chess."

"Not all problems can be solved by chess, Deep Blue. One day, you'll understand that. "
- Al Gore

Step 1 Tools And Materials

Tools

• Soldering Iron
• sponge (for cleaning your iron)
• Solder braid or solder sucker
• Cutting tool (box cutter, X-acto knife)
• Wire cutters/strippers
• Straight edge/ruler
• Hot glue gun
• Printer (or good drawing skills)
• Dremel or drill
• Helping hands
• A fan (to exhaust solder fumes)

Materials

• solder
• double sided tape or foam stickies
• hot glue sticks
• black spray paint(lots of it)
• Duct tape, preferably black but its mostly on the inside, so it won't be seen.
• Black zip ties
• clay or silly putty
• Some kind of blinking device. "Lots of them"). I used simple electronic dice. They were 95 cents at a surplus store(Ax-Man actually. I got pretty much everything listed here there. Great store, if you're in the area :D) each and I got about 30 of them.
• Cardboard boxes. I used two stacked on top of each other so they would fit in my car folded up, but a one piece refrigerator box would do. Beyond that, you also need the cardboard for external surface detail.
• Greebling bits. Greebling is meaningless detail that makes thing look, well.. futurey. More complex than it really is. I used a combination of cardboard remnants and the plastic shells from the electronic dice, but multiples of any kind of lightweight plastic bit will do (plastic model kits, wires, tubes, weird Styrofoam packing material, those paper drink holders from fast food places.. anything!)
• Wire. Again, lots of it. I needed about 300 feet of wire. Try to get multiple colors so you can tell them apart.
• Momentary on/off switches
• 12 V cooling fans and 9 volt batteries (with battery clips)
• 2 Shoulder straps from a backpack or a bag
• Some kind of strong light foam. I was looking for the pink kind used in wall insulation, but could only come up with the gray porous packing kind.

Comments

[Crucio]

Wow, that turned out so great! I'm thinking of making one from 1/4" plywood as a shell for my rack!

[Ceiling cat]

Dude! Where did you get the Kraftwerk shirt! It's AWSOME! btw I never say dude, I think that may be the first time.

[Penis Enlargement Pills]

[RebelWithoutASauce]

Okay this costume takes the cake.

[jeff-o]

Oh, wow. That is probably one of the nerdiest costumes I've ever seen. I Approve! :D

[Gamer917]

no, an HEV suit would be the nerdiest

[Newblit]

Agreed lol. I have to throw in the comment though that if anyone besides me saw the documentary on how rigged this game was and why it was so hard for him to beat Deep Blue, even though it ended as a tie.

[sponges]

I saw the documentary you are talking about, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, and I was both fascinated and disappointed. IT was really stilted and badly researched, yet it is to date the only documentary n Deep Blue that I know of. It doesn't answer any of the questions it raises with any depth and really said nothing at all for all its ambiguity.

[sponges]

hah, thanks!

[skipernicus]

It strikes me you could have used red LED Christmas lights if you could rig up some sort of portable power supply.

[brndn]

That is truly amazing.

[santy22]

What do you think, Deep Blue? -King to a-1 Not everything can be solved with chess, my computery friend.

[sponges]

yay, someone who understands :D

[01101101011]

yay i voted for this!!!

[sponges]

hey thanks!

[Ph3nomin0n]

YEA!! Deep Blue FTW!!!!!

[sponges]

woo!

[rickyd!]

deep blue = todays gameboy