Author of the book Behind Deep Blue, Feng-hsiung Hsu started his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon in the field of computer chess in the year 1985 which eventually culminated in the defeat of the World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Prior to building the supercomputer Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov, Feng-hsiung Hsu worked on many other chess computers. He started with ChipTest, a simple Chess-playing chip much different than the other Chess playing computer being developed at Carnegie Mellon, Hitech, which was developed by Hans Berliner and included 64 different chess chips. Feng-hsiung Hsu went on to build the successively better Chess playing computers Deep Thought, Deep Thought II, and Deep Blue Prototype.