Deep Blue Beats the Chess Champion
Next: May 11, 2027
The day a computer won at chess.
The story
Where it comes from
On 11 May 1997, at the Equitable Center in New York, IBM's Deep Blue won the sixth and final game of its rematch with the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and took the match 3½–2½. It was the first time a computer had beaten a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament time controls. Kasparov had won their first match, in Philadelphia in 1996, by 4–2. This Story marks the anniversary of a turning point in computing, and of a champion who said the machine was 'far stronger than anybody expected'.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance, but it is a good day to play a game of chess, with a friend, a child or a computer, or to replay that sixth game, which Kasparov resigned after just 19 moves. Teachers and chess clubs can use the date to talk about how computers learned to play, and about what people still bring to the board.
Did you know
- Deep Blue used 32 processors working in parallel and could evaluate 200 million chess positions a second.
- Its story began with Feng-hsiung Hsu, a graduate student from Taiwan at Carnegie Mellon University, whose chess machine ChipTest won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1987.
- After the match Deep Blue was retired to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
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