Kasparov gets a case of the Deep Blues

"It was one zeal to beat Garry Kasparov. And when a big corporation with unlimited resources would like to do so, there are many ways to achieve the result."
Garry Kasparov

After decades of the mental struggle between man and machine, the machine finally won. In May, Deep Blue -- an IBM supercomputer -- defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in six games. It was the first time a computer had won a chess match against a current world champion under tournament conditions.

Kasparov won the first game, lost the second, then played to a draw in the next three. Deep Blue won in only an hour in game six, in which "Kasparov got wiped off the board," grand master Ilya Gurevich said.

After the 19-move final game, Kasparov raged against the machine, claiming that IBM had programmed Deep Blue specifically to beat him.

"It was nothing to do about science," Kasparov said. "It was one zeal to beat Garry Kasparov. And when a big corporation with unlimited resources would like to do so, there are many ways to achieve the result."

Deep Blue is a monster of a machine, running on 256 processors designed specifically for chess. It can examine 200 million positions per second, compared to the human brain's three per second.

A year earlier, Kasparov defeated Deep Blue. Afterwards, IBM brought in grand master Joel Benjamin to try to make the machine "think" like a master.

Because chess is an extremely complex game that follows relatively simple rules, IBM says, it's a good testing ground for technology that can be adapted to tackle such challenges as global warming, financial modeling and molecular chemistry.

"Obviously, chess is a very small part of this," IBM's C.J. Tan says on the Deep Blue Web site. "For us, it's really to understand how computers can solve problems, and how we, as human beings, can use tools ... to solve complex problems."