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Chess required guile, wit, and foresight-distinctly human traits-and a hunk of hardware, the chess community thought, could not replicate all that-at least not well enough to beat Kasparov.īut the tin box won that game, becoming the first computer to defeat a sitting world chess champion.Ĭhess players and computer scientists alike were stunned.
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Commercial companies had begun providing Internet access to the general public only the year before. Personal computers were just over a decade old, and looked liked this. He’d previously scoffed at the suggestion that a chess-playing computer might defeat a grandmaster before the year 2000, which, back then, probably seemed pretty ridiculous to most people. “There was no way that this tin box was going to defeat a reigning world champion,” says Maurice Ashley, an American grand chessmaster who provided live commentary for the game that day. Deep Blue was a 6-foot-5-inch, 2,800-pound supercomputer designed by a team of IBM scientists. Garry Kasparov, the Soviet grandmaster, was the World Chess champion, famous for his aggressive and uncompromising style of play. Two chess players met for the first of six tournament matches. One such moment came on February 10, 1996, at a convention center in Philadelphia. There was a time, not long ago, when computers-mere assemblages of silicon and wire and plastic that can fly planes, drive cars, translate languages, and keep failing hearts beating-could really, truly still surprise us.