On May 11, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated champion Garry Kasparov 3½–2½. The system combined massive game-tree search, custom evaluation, and specialized hardware.
Debate was immediate: was it “intelligence” or brute force? Kasparov questioned irregularities; IBM retired the machine. Culturally, the match fixed the idea that machines could surpass humans in emblematic domains.
Today chess is dominated by nets + search (AlphaZero, Stockfish NNUE). Deep Blue remains a bridge between symbolic brute-force AI and the learning era.
