IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
On this day · 11 May 1997
In a New York television studio, a machine beat a reigning world champion over a full match for the first time.
On 11 May 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the deciding game of their six-game rematch in New York. It was the first time a computer had beaten a standing world champion in a match played at standard tournament time controls.
The machine could evaluate some 200 million chess positions per second. In the final game, Deep Blue offered a knight sacrifice that wrecked Kasparov’s defenses; the champion resigned after just 19 moves, in a game lasting barely an hour. The match ended two wins to one, with three draws.
Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of Deep Blue in 1996, making this a rematch. Stung, he accused IBM’s team of human interference and requested another contest. IBM declined, retired the machine, and shelved the project. One of Deep Blue’s two towers now sits in a museum collection, a relic of the moment machines first out-calculated the best human mind at the board.
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