IBM developed Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov in a 1997 chess match.
Deep Blue was a specialized chess-playing supercomputer developed by IBM researchers. It defeated Kasparov in a six-game match held in New York City in May 1997, winning two games, losing one, and drawing three.
The victory was historically important because it marked the first time a reigning world chess champion lost a match to a computer under standard tournament conditions. Deep Blue relied heavily on calculating enormous numbers of possible moves, supplemented by sophisticated chess knowledge and evaluation rules.
People sometimes confuse Deep Blue with IBM’s later Watson system. Watson became famous for answering natural-language clues on Jeopardy! in 2011, while Deep Blue was designed specifically for chess and used a different computing approach.