Today in Technology History
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February 10
The famous chess matches between the world's top-ranked chess player and a series of chess-playing computers began exactly seven years ago.
On February 10, 1996, Garry Kimovich Kasparov played against the computer called "Deep Blue" for the first time. Kasparov, born in Azerbaijan in 1963, became the youngest world chess champion in 1985. That same year, a doctoral student at Carnegie-Mellon started working on a chess-playing computer that would eventually become IBM's Deep Blue.
In 1996, Kasparov lost the first game of his first match against Deep Blue. Kasparov won the next game, however. The next two games were draws, and the last two games went to Kasparov -- so the human won the match, 4-2.
A rematch was held the next year. Kasparov again battled a machine called Deep Blue, although the 1997 version was much faster than the 1996 version. This time, Kasparov got spooked, and he lost to the computer by a score of 3.5 to 2.5. It was the first match Kasparov ever lost.
Kasparov finished a third major match against a machine just last week. This time, his opponent wasn't a computer designed to play chess -- it was a chess-playing computer program called "Deep Junior," which anyone can buy and run on their home computer. The match had several dramatic and perplexing moments, particularly when Kasparov accepted a dangerous sacrifice in the fifth game, and when he offered a questionable draw in the final game last Friday even though he could have beaten Deep Junior. The match ended in a 3-3 tie.
Certainly, computers have permanently changed the way humans play chess, just like calculators changed the way we do math. "We don't work at chess anymore," according to one of the world's top-ranked players. "We just look at the stupid computer, we follow the latest games and find small improvements. We have lost depth."
Still, says another chess grandmaster, that won't damage our fascination with the game: "Cars can outrun us, but that hasn't stopped us from having foot races. Even if a computer is the best player on the planet, I'll still want to go around the corner, set up the chess pieces and try to kick your butt."
Related links:
Use these links to read more about Kasparov's matches against machines in 1996, 1997 and 2003.
Early computer scientists like Konrad Zuse and Claude Shannon also made machines play chess.
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