Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov

Second match (rematch)

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 to a computer under tournament conditions.

The 1997 match was the subject of a documentary film, The Man vs. The Machine.

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. 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.

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. Go is widely played in especially China, South Korea, and Japan, and was considered one of the four arts of the Chinese scholar in antiquity. While Go programs were only able to defeat amateur players until 2015, in a 2016 match reminiscent of Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program surprisingly defeated Lee Sedol in the match AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol. Where 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.

Similarly, in 2017, a team of engineers at MIT designed an AI that was the first of its kind to consistently defeat a variety of professional players at Super Smash Bros. Melee.

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