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.” 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.