Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov

IBM’s Deep Blue, a specialized chess-playing computer, defeats Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. The event generates enormous media attention and public anxiety about machine intelligence.

Deep Blue uses brute-force search: it evaluates hundreds of millions of positions per second using handcrafted evaluation functions. It does not understand chess in any cognitive sense. It has no ability to transfer what it does in chess to any other domain.

The defeat demonstrates something important about AI: a system can produce outputs that look like intelligence – expert chess play – through mechanisms that have nothing in common with human expert cognition. This gap between apparent capability and underlying mechanism is a recurring feature of AI systems.

Source: Bruce Weber, “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov,” The New York Times, May 12, 1997.