This week, MCI remembers an event that would herald the future, the famous chess game between the Deep Blue IBM computer and Garry Kasparov. Kasparov had claimed that he couldn’t be beaten by any computer and the tournament was set up. The first game in February 1996 was won by Kasparov, but after the folk at IBM tweaked Deep Blue, Kasparov was beaten this week in 1997. Many of us will remember Kasparov’s barely disguised anger at losing on TV.
The most important thing to come out of this match is that AI was thrust into the public eye as becoming a potential match for human intelligence. It has, however, also been argued that Kasparov played an uncharacteristically bad game. Whatever it may have been, it was the game which heralded AI into our lives and it is surprising how it now helps us in our day to day chores.
In 2016, Kasparov gave a retrospective of the famous games and said that whilst writing his book he gained a deeper respect for the IBM team. We may look at Deep Blue with a degree of scepticism as our modern computers far surpass Deep Blue’s capabilities, but we cannot escape it’s place in history.