He was born in Taiwan, and came to US after graduating from National Taiwan University with B.S. in E.E.. He started his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in the field of computer chess in the year 1985. In 1989 he joined IBM to design a chess-playing computer

In 1991, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him a Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on Deep Blue. In 1996, the supercomputer lost to world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Prior to building the supercomputer Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov, Hsu worked on many other chess computers. He started with ChipTest, a simple chess-playing chip, based on a design from Unix-inventor's Ken Thompson's Belle , and very different from the other chess-playing computer being developed at Carnegie Mellon, HiTech, which was developed by Hans Berliner and included 64 different chess chips for the move generator instead of the one in Hsu's series. Hsu went on to build the successively better chess-playing computers Deep Thought , Deep Thought II , and Deep Blue Prototype .

Hsu now manages the platforms and devices center of Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing. He has stated the view that brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in the ancient Asian game of Go .

• Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion . Princeton University Press, 2002. (ISBN 0-691-09065-3). Review by ChessBase.com

• Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov

• Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1

• Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6

• Arimaa

• Feng-hsiung Hsu at IBM

• Oral History of Feng-Hsiung Hsu. Interviewed by: Dag Spicer. Recorded: February 14, 2005 at Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California

• Feng-hsiung Hsu's papers at DBLP

• Chess, China, and Education: A Ubiquity Interview with F-H Hsu

• Open Letter from Feng-hsiung Hsu one of the main programmers of Deep Blue, and Open Letter from Owen Williams to Feng-hsiung Hsu on Deep Blue