Could a machine outthink the best human mind in the world? Thirty years ago that was still an open question, but a historic matchup between a chess grandmaster and an IBM supercomputer answered it.
On a cold February day in 1996, hundreds of chess fans filed into the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. They clutched scorecards and stared at a giant video screen.
In the next room sat Garry Kasparov, world chess champion for 11 years running. Across from him: a human surrogate playing on behalf of a supercomputer that IBM called Deep Blue. It was designed to test the limits of artificial intelligence, and could calculate about 100 million chess moves a second.
Computer programs had been capable of beating a human in standard chess since the 1960s, but in 1996 most experts — including chess grandmaster Michael Rohde — still thought a champion's mind had the advantage over Deep Blue.
"When it's trying to make a decision it can see all the possibilities, but it's very hard for it to evaluate whether one position is slightly better than another," Rohde told NPR. "And that's where humans still have a big edge."
As the game got underway, Kasparov played aggressively — probing, attacking.
Deep Blue responded. It didn't feel fatigue or get distracted, and it had been trained on every game Kasparov had ever played.
As the hours passed, the balance shifted. Kasparov miscalculated; Deep Blue didn't. And then — checkmate: A computer had beaten a world champion in a regulation chess game for the very first time.
"I compared it to being in Mission Control in Houston, you know, when we landed on the moon," said fellow chess grandmaster Joel Benjamin, who helped IBM develop Deep Blue. "It was that kind of electricity, you know? Everybody was jumping up and down and very excited. It was really thrilling."
Kasparov would regroup, winning the next three games and drawing two to take the 1996 match. He spoke two days later about his shocking initial loss to Deep Blue.
"It attacks, you know? It finds the shortest cut to any weakness in your position," he said. "It doesn't hesitate, it doesn't have any doubts, it's not scared by your illusionary threats. And that's why, you know, it was [the] absolute worst, and, you know, it was a massacre, which was well-deserved."
Technology kept marching forward, and one year later an upgraded Deep Blue would defeat Kasparov outright in a six-game match, winning two and drawing three.
Today computer intelligence surpassing Deep Blue's is commonplace, even on the smartphones in our pocket. Yet AI still astonishes us with its capacity to imitate us. And like Deep Blue, it has its skeptics.
But that game in Philadelphia on February 10, 1996, marks the moment we first proved that an intellect we built could beat the best of us at our own game.
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