The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play-if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations-with godlike perfection. It was the specialists-the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts-who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.

The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts-and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power-and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. machine chess.Įleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the “Kasparov” brand models. It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition.

Garry Kasparov during his rematch against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, 1997

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