Deep Blue was a legendary chess playing IBM supercomputer, which in 1997, made history by being the first ever computer to beat the human world chess champion at the time, Garry Kasparov, marking a moment which many consider that at which «computers finally outsmarted humans».
Since this victory, computers and artificial intelligence have become more powerful; for example, it is now possible for a human to play chess against a computer, such as with a mobile phone running Stockfish.
1985 saw the birth of ChipTest, a program written by Feng-hsiung Hsu1, Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell at Carnegie Mellon University. It went on to win some computer chess tournaments, and when multiple people were already working on it as a part of IBM research, it was renamed to Deep Thought after the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
By 1990, it has already played the world champion, Garry Kasparov2, but lost. In 1996 Deep Blue played him again, this time losing the match again, but already having won a game, showing the potential was there.
In May 1997, after upgrade both in hardware and software, it finally beat Kasparov with 3 wins, 2 losses and 1 draw.
It's important to know that Deep Blue wasn't really a general chess engine like Stockfish, it was a single purpose supercomputer; a combination of hardware and software engineered from the ground up with the single purpose: win the match against the other play. In 1997, this opponent was Garry Kasparov, the world champion of chess.
It was being fine tuned in between the games with assistance of grandmasters. A team of experts on computers and chess focused their efforts on this single opponent at the specific time controls and match set up, rather than trying to make a generally usable chess computer. They studied Kasparov's play and made Deep Blue ready for it; they even employed psychological tricks – for example it had preprogrammed instant responses to some Kasparov's expected moves, so as to make him more nervous.
In a rematch, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three.
Deep Blue was mainly relying on massively parallel brute force, i.e. looking many moves ahead and consulting stored databases of games; in 1997 it had some 11 GFLOPS3. The base computer was IBM RS/6000 SP (taking two cabinets) with IBM AIX operating system, using 32 PowerPC 200 MHz processors and 480 specialized «chess chips».
It had evaluation function implemented in hardware. All in all the whole system could search hundreds of millions positions per second. Non-extended search was performed to a depth of about 12 plies, extended search went even over 40 plies deep. It had an opening book with about 4000 positions and endgame tablebases for up to 6 pieces. It was programmed in C.
This page was last edited on 2026-10-18 22:17:26.
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