IBM Deep Blue chess computer

Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov

Competitions & BenchmarksQuiet Emergence
Impact

What Happened

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.

Why It Mattered

A watershed cultural moment. Front-page news worldwide. Proved machines could beat the best humans at the 'ultimate intellectual game.' But it was brute force, not intelligence — a distinction that mattered.

Key People

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Part of the Quiet Emergence (1994–2005) era · Browse all competitions & benchmarks · View all 1997 milestones

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