What happened when the world chess champion lost to a computer for the first time in 1997?
Garry Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. IBM dismantled the machine. The tapes were never released.
The answer
On May 11, 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in a six-game rematch in New York City, becoming the first computer system to beat a reigning world champion under standard tournament conditions. Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million positions per second using 30 IBM RS/6000 processors with 480 custom chess chips, combining brute-force search with an evaluation function hand-tuned by grandmaster Joel Benjamin. Kasparov was particularly unsettled by a creative move in Game 2 that seemed to show genuine strategic understanding - he later alleged human intervention, though IBM denied this. After the historic victory, IBM retired Deep Blue rather than granting Kasparov a rematch, and its stock rose $18 billion in market value.
Source: IBM Research
- deep-blue
- chess
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