Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess match against a reigning world champion.
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 in Deep Blue’s favor. Kasparov was the reigning world chess champion, making the result a landmark for computer chess and artificial intelligence.
Deep Blue was a specialized supercomputer built to analyze chess positions. Its strength came from extremely fast calculation, a large opening library, and evaluation methods created with chess expertise. It did not think like a human and was not a general-purpose autonomous robot with a body.
A 1996 match between Kasparov and an earlier version of Deep Blue ended with a Kasparov victory. Deep Thought, another IBM chess computer, was an earlier predecessor rather than the machine that won the 1997 match.