History of Computers - Deep Blue
Introduction
Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match. It was the first piece of artificial intelligence to win a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion.
Deep Blue, the greatest chess player of all time.
Overview
In 1996, Kasparov defeated Deep Blue in a six game match. Deep Blue won two games, Kasparov won one and the other three games resulted in a draw. These games lasted several days and were popular all over the world [1]. IBM developers and programmers worked to improve Deep Blue for the next year. Kasparov accused Deep Blue of cheating because it displayed deep intelligence and human creativity behind its moves, making him believe that only human intervention could have found those moves, but IBM denied all accusations. IBM had tried many times before to dethrone humans from the top of the chess world, but nothing worked until Deep Blue and its processors. The reason why Deep Blue was able to win was because the computer was fed with the information of millions of past games, which it learned from and was able to apply the information in its games, thus resulting in the eventual defeat of Kasparov. The parallel of Deep Blue would be Google's AlphaGo computer. Running a unix based, AIX operating system written in C[2], Deep Blue was able to record over 200 million moves per second or 50 billion positions a second, calculating exactly what the right move would be.[3].
Significance
Computers had outmatched humans long before in match, but chess was thought to be different because chess requires forethought and even grace, something believed to be impossible for a computer to be capable of. In 1997 Deep Blue showed the world that computers are breaking new boundaries and human feats of the mind and body are capable by the computer. In 1997 Deep Blue showed the world the impossible.
