Deep Blue won first chess game against world champion - February 10, 1996

On this day in 1996, the IBM computer Deep Blue won its first game against a world chess champion.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio Welcome Back. I'm your host Eves, and you're
tuned into This Day in History Class, a show that
takes history and squeezes it into bite size stories. Today
is February. The day was February. The IBM computer Deep

(00:28):
Blue became the first machine to beat a reigning chess
world champion in a regular tournament. Over the years, scientists
have turned to chess to test computer's abilities, since the
game is challenging but has defined rules. The link between
machines and chess goes all the way back to the
eighteenth century, when Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kimberlin created the Turk,

(00:51):
a fake chess playing machine that was actually operated by
a human hiding inside of it. By the nineteen fifties,
scientists were putting were serious efforts into researching computer chess
playing chest computers associate numerical values with the positions of
each chess piece using a formula called an evaluation function.

(01:12):
The computers used those values to determine the best move
to make. After years of researchers developing chests playing hardware,
computers were still not able to beat human chess players,
but advances in custom chip technology eventually allowed computers to
do faster and deeper searching. In A graduate student at

(01:34):
a Carnegie Mellon University named Function Shoe began working on
a chess playing machine called chip Test. After chip Test
came Deep Thought, another computer made to play chess. Shoe,
along with some of his classmates, worked on the team
that developed Deep Thought. Deep Thought could process seven hundred
and twenty thousand moves per second. It was the first

(01:57):
computer to beat a grandmaster in a regular tournament game.
It also won the nineteen eighty nine World Computer Chess Championship,
an event where chess engines compete against one another. IBM
Research hired some of the Carnegie Melon researchers to work
on the successor to Deep Thought. IBM Research is the
innovation arm of IBM and American Technology Company. At IBM,

(02:22):
the researchers were joined by other computer scientists, including Jerry
Brody and C. J. Tan. They called the computer chess
playing system they were working on Deep Blue. Deep Blue
went up against Gary Kasparov, a Russian chess grandmaster, in
World Chess Champion in nine at a tournament in Philadelphia

(02:42):
on February. Deep Blue won the opening game of the match,
making it the first machine to win a chess game
against a reigning chess world champion under regular tournament time controls.
But in the following five games of the match, deep
Blue either lost or drew, and Kasparov ended up winning
the match. At that point, deep Blue can analyze one

(03:05):
hundred million moves per second, but that was not enough
to beat human skill and strategy, so the IBM team
upgraded Deep Blue to a system unofficially called deeper Blue.
They created a thirty processor supercomputer with four hundred and
eighty custom integrated circuits that were designed to play chess.
The computer could evaluate around two hundred million moves per second.

(03:29):
This new version of Deep Blue got a rematch against
Kasparov in New York City in May. In this sixth
game match, deep Blue defeated Kasparoff in the deciding sixth game,
winning three and a half to two and a half.
Kasparoff and other chess masters pinned the defeat on a
single unexpected move that confused Casparof The match got a

(03:53):
lot of media attention and put high powered computing on
the world stage. Though Deep Blue was eventually retired. It
inspired later computers, and researchers applied its architecture to financial modeling,
data mining, and molecular dynamics. Years after the match, one
of the computer scientists who designed Deep Blue, Murray Campbell,

(04:16):
said the infamous, unexpected move the computer made was the
result of a book in the computer software I'm Eves
Jeff Coote, and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. Feel free to share
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(04:40):
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(05:01):
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