Race Against the Machine

Game Over?

Today in 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to win a chess game against a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, under regular time controls.

Deep Blue won one game, tied two and lost three. The next year, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a six-game match -- the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer opponent in tournament play. Deep Blue was a combination of special purpose hardware and software, a system capable of examining 200 million moves per second, or 50 billion positions, in the three minutes allocated for a single move in a chess game.