The 1997 match took place not on a standard stage, but rather in a small television studio. The match’s outcome made headlines worldwide, and helped a broad audience better understand high-powered computing. Game 6 ended the match with a crushing defeat of the champion by Deep Blue. The chess grandmaster won the first game, Deep Blue took the next one, and the two players drew the three following games. The IBMers knew their machine could explore up to 200 million possible chess positions per second. The odds of Deep Blue winning were not certain, but the science was solid. The champion and computer met at the Equitable Center in New York, with cameras running, press in attendance and millions watching the outcome. The human chess champion won in 1996 against an earlier version of Deep Blue the 1997 match was billed as a “rematch.” There, they continued their work with the help of other computer scientists, including Joe Hoane, Jerry Brody and C. A classmate of his, Murray Campbell, worked on the project, too, and in 1989, both were hired to work at IBM Research.

In 1985, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, Feng-hsiung Hsu, began working on his dissertation project: a chess playing machine he called ChipTest. IBM computer scientists had been interested in chess computing since the early 1950s.

Over the years, many computers took on many chess masters, and the computers lost. The game is a collection of challenging problems for minds and machines, but has simple rules, and so is perfect for such experiments. Since the emergence of artificial intelligence and the first computers in the late 1940s, computer scientists compared the performance of these “giant brains” with human minds, and gravitated to chess as a way of testing the calculating abilities of computers.

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