Deep Blue
IBM's 1997 chess supercomputer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov with brute-force search and hand-tuned evaluation, not learning.
Deep Blue was an IBM chess-playing supercomputer, led by Feng-hsiung Hsu, that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997. It evaluated on the order of 200 million positions per second using symbolic AI-style search and expert-crafted evaluation functions, not machine learning from data.
The match was a global media event and a benchmark moment for “can machines beat humans at intelligence?” Kasparov later called the machine “as intelligent as your alarm clock.” IBM’s next public contest in 2011 was Watson winning the quiz show Jeopardy!, answering clues in natural language. The symbolic brute-force path contrasts with AlphaGo, which learned Go strategy with deep learning and reinforcement learning almost twenty years later. See the article and timeline entry for the full story.