The 1997 Chess Game With Garry Kasparov

Developers at IBM, the US firm that made Deep Blue, were ecstatic with the victory but quickly refocused on the wider significance

Paris: 

With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.

May 11, 1997 was a watershed for the relationship between man and machine, when the artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved what developers had been promising for decades.

It was an « incredible » moment, AI expert Philippe Rolet told AFP, even if the enduring technological impact was not so huge.

« Deep Blue’s victory made people realise that machines could be as strong as humans, even on their territory, » he said.

Developers at IBM, the US firm that made Deep Blue, were ecstatic with the victory but quickly refocused on the wider significance.

« This is not about man versus machine. This is really about how we, humans, use technology to solve difficult problems, » said Deep Blue team chief Chung-Jen Tan after the match, listing possible benefits from financial analysis to weather forecasting.

Read more