Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov was a pair of six-game chess matches between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. The first match was played in Philadelphia in 1996 and won by Kasparov. The second was played in New York City in 1997 and won by Deep Blue. The 1997 match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions.
The 1997 match was the subject of a documentary film, The Man vs. The Machine.[1]
Symbolic significance
Deep Blue's win was seen as very symbolically significant, a sign that artificial intelligence was catching up to human intelligence, and could defeat one of humanity's great intellectual champions.[2] Later analysis tended to play down Kasparov's loss as a result of uncharacteristically bad play on Kasparov's part, and play down the intellectual value of chess as a game which can be defeated by brute force.[3][4]
Deep Blue's victory switched the canonical example of a game where humans outmatched machines to the ancient Chinese game of Go, a game of simple rules and far more possible moves than chess, which requires more intuition and is less susceptible to brute force.[5] Go is widely played in China, South Korea, and Japan, and was considered one of the four arts of the Chinese scholar in antiquity. Go programs were only able to defeat amateur players until 2015, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program surprisingly defeated Lee Sedol in the match AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol.[6] While Deep Blue mainly relied on brute computational force to evaluate millions of positions, AlphaGo also relied on neural networks and reinforcement learning which more closely resemble human decision-making.
Summary
The 1996 match
Game #
White
Black
Result
Comment
1
Deep Blue
Kasparov
1–0
2
Kasparov
Deep Blue
1–0
3
Deep Blue
Kasparov
½–½
Draw by mutual agreement
4
Kasparov
Deep Blue
½–½
Draw by mutual agreement
5
Deep Blue
Kasparov
0–1
Kasparov offered a draw after the 23rd move.
6
Kasparov
Deep Blue
1–0
Result: Kasparov–Deep Blue: 4–2
The 1997 rematch
Game #
White
Black
Result
Comment
1
Kasparov
Deep Blue
1–0
2
Deep Blue
Kasparov
1–0
3
Kasparov
Deep Blue
½–½
Draw by mutual agreement
4
Deep Blue
Kasparov
½–½
Draw by mutual agreement
5
Kasparov
Deep Blue
½–½
Draw by mutual agreement
6
Deep Blue
Kasparov
1–0
Result: Deep Blue–Kasparov: 3½–2½