Thursday, May 11, 2017

20 years ago: Deep Blue defeats Kasparov

The (arguably?) strongest player of the pre-Carlsen era, Garry Kasparov, spectacularly lost his match against the computer Deep Blue when on 11 May 1997 his entire game broke down, leading to one of the most spectacular losses of his career.

For the first time in history, a reigning world chess champion was defeated by a computer in a match with long games.

What followed was an ugly argument between Kasparov and IBM, supposedly Kasparov alleged that IBM did not only have the computer make the moves for the sixth game.
Was Kasparov victim to "a ploy to boost IBM's stock market" (as Wikipedia says a movie made in 2003 suggests), or did we witness the world champion losing fair and square?

IBM published the logs of Deep Blue, and possibly Kasparov fell into a trap he built himself by choosing a weak opening that usually a computer would play horribly. Did the tricks of the world champion fire back, or was he tricked otherwise?

Twenty years later, some questions still are left unanswered.

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