1997
Deep Blue defeats Kasparov
IBM's chess computer Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 — the first time a computer defeats the best human chess player in the world.
The match of the century
In May 1997, IBM's chess computer Deep Blue played a six-game rematch against world chess champion Garry Kasparov in New York. Deep Blue won with 3.5–2.5, making history as the first computer to defeat a reigning world chess champion in a match under standard tournament conditions. The victory made front-page news worldwide and is considered a watershed moment in the public perception of AI.
How Deep Blue worked
Deep Blue was not a learning system in the modern sense. It used a combination of brute-force search — evaluating up to 200 million positions per second — and a handcrafted evaluation function developed with help from grandmasters. The system ran on specialized chess chips and could look ahead 12 to 14 moves on average, deeper in critical positions. It was an engineering triumph, but its intelligence was narrow and brittle: Deep Blue could do nothing except play chess.
Kasparov's reaction
Kasparov, who had beaten an earlier version of Deep Blue in 1996, was deeply shaken. After game 2 — which Deep Blue won with a move Kasparov found incomprehensibly creative — he accused IBM of cheating and suspected human intervention. IBM denied this and refused to show the computer's logs. The controversy still simmers. Kasparov later wrote the book Deep Thinking (2017), in which he reflected on what the match meant for human intelligence and the future of AI.
Symbolic value
Chess had long been seen as the ultimate test of human intelligence — "the Drosophila of artificial intelligence," as it was called. When Deep Blue won, many felt a line had been crossed. But AI researchers were quick to note that chess mastery is a narrow skill: Deep Blue could not transfer its ability to any other domain. The victory symbolized the power of specialized AI, not general intelligence. It took until AlphaGo in 2016 for a computer to conquer Go — a game considered far more complex than chess.
Sources
- Kasparov, G. (2017). Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. PublicAffairs.
- Campbell, M. et al. (2002). Deep Blue. Artificial Intelligence, 134(1–2), 57–83.
- Wikipedia — Deep Blue