Feng-hsiung Hsu & Murray Campbell, graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University initiated a chess playing machine called Chiptest. IBM hired them in 1989 and the first version of such computer named Deep Thought was released in 1994 to play against Kosporov. In a two game match Kosporov easily defeated the computer. Scientist further upgraded the computer as Deep Blue which was an IBM RISC System/6000 Scalable Power Parallel System. It had 32 processors dedicated to calculation, each processor connected to 6 chess specific processors. It could calculate 100 million chess positions per second.
In February 1996, Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue met for the first time in a best of six-games match. The match was organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to mark the 50th birthday of the first computer. The hardware was installed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, with a connection to Philadelphia via the Internet. After only the first game played on 10 February 1996, Deep Blue made history by defeating Kasparov. Deep Blue’s victory marked the first time that a current world champion had ever been beaten by a computer opponent under regular tournament conditions. But Kasparov would not go down so easily. The world champion, known for his tenacity and his ferocious will to win, took the game two. Games three and four, although tightly contested, ended up in draws. Then, in game five, Kasparov again changed tactics mid-game to defeat Deep Blue. Kasparov won the final game totally outplaying the computer and took the match by a score of 4 – 2.
Deep Blue was further upgraded to 8 chess specific processors and capacity to calculate 2 million moves per second. In 1997 the rematch was organized at Equitable Center in New York. The chess grandmaster won the first game, Deep Blue took the next one, and the two players drew the three following games. Game 6 ended the match with a crushing defeat of the champion by Deep Blue. The match’s outcome made headlines worldwide, and helped a broad audience better understand high-powered computing. In the second game which Deep Blue won, it seems a software bug led to a move which Kosparov could not interpret and lost the game.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov
http://www.top-5000.nl/matches/1996.htm
https://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/meet/html/d.3.1.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/deepblue/
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/01/deep-blue-bug
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