Competitions & Benchmarks
7 milestones in AI history
Quiet Emergence (1994–2005)
Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov
IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match (3.5-2.5). It was the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer under standard tournament conditions. Deep Blue evaluated 200 million positions per second using brute-force search and hand-crafted evaluation.
DARPA Grand Challenge: Self-Driving Cars Begin
DARPA offered $1M for an autonomous vehicle to complete a 150-mile desert course. In 2004, no vehicle finished — the best went 7.4 miles. In 2005, Stanford's 'Stanley' (led by Sebastian Thrun) won by completing the course in under 7 hours. The 2007 Urban Challenge tested autonomous driving in traffic.
Deep Learning Dawn (2006–2011)
The Netflix Prize
Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%. The competition attracted thousands of teams and ran for 3 years (won in 2009). It popularized collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, and ensemble methods.
IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy!
IBM's Watson system defeated the two greatest Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a televised match. Watson used natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning to understand nuanced questions with puns and wordplay.
