Deep Blue was the first robot to defeat a reigning human world chess champion in a standard match.
IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a six-game match held in New York in May 1997. The final score was 3½–2½, giving the computer the match victory after two wins, three draws, and one loss.
Deep Blue was a specialized chess computer rather than a humanoid robot. Its system used custom hardware capable of examining enormous numbers of chess positions, alongside software that evaluated positions and searched possible moves.
Kasparov had defeated an earlier version of the machine in a 1996 match, winning 4–2. The 1997 result therefore marked the first match victory by a computer over a reigning world champion under standard tournament conditions. It did not mean computers had solved chess.