May 11 1997 – Deep Blue Defeats Garry Kasparov
Fifteen months after the first man-versus-machine chess match-up, world champion Garry Kasparov faced Deep Blue — an IBM supercomputer — in New York City. Competing in a traditional six-game format, Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a grandmaster on May 11, 1997. In defeating a human at one of the most thought-intensive games ever invented, Deep Blue exploded myths about the limits of digital intelligence. For IBM, the Deep Blue victory was nearly a decade in the making. The project began as a graduate study by Feng-hsiung Hsu while working on his master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University. Working alongside Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell, Hsu developed ChipTest and its successor, Deep Thought, before receiving his diploma. Matched up with Kasparov and another International Master, Michael Valvo, Deep Thought was comprehensively beaten by both in two-game matches in 1989. Intrigued by the possibilities of a chess-playing computer capable of world-class strategy, the research and development arm of IBM snatched the three programmers up and allowed them to continue their work.