In May 1997 in New York City, a 6.5-foot-tall IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue sat down (so to speak) to play chess against Garry Kasparov, the world champion and possibly the greatest chess player who had ever lived. They played six games over a week. Deep Blue won 3.5 to 2.5.
Kasparov was shaken. He had beaten an earlier version of Deep Blue a year before. This new one was much stronger. It could look at 200 million possible chess positions every second - vastly more than any human could. But it didn’t really “understand” chess. It just searched through endless possibilities incredibly fast and picked the best one.
The match changed how people thought about computers and intelligence. For the first time, a machine had outplayed a human at something seen as a peak of human thinking. Today even free chess apps on a cheap phone can defeat every human grandmaster alive. Deep Blue was retired soon after the match and now sits in a museum.
