I was part of a group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University that IBM approached. How did you first get involved in the Deep Blue project?

“By the time of our final match in 1997, we had made enough improvements to the system based on our experience that we were able to win.” Scientific American spoke with Campbell about computer scientists’ long obsession with chess, how IBM was able to turn the tables on the reigning chess champ and the challenges that lie ahead for AI. Watson Research Center’s Cognitive Computing organization. That seemingly small victory “was very important to us to show that we were on the right track,” says Deep Blue AI expert Murray Campbell, now a distinguished research staff member in the AI Foundations group within IBM T. The Deep Blue team lost again to Kasparov in 1996 at a tournament in Philadelphia but managed to win one game out of six against the world champ. team’s technology to bring its researchers onboard to develop an early version of Deep Blue-Deep Thought’s successor. This success was short-lived-later that same year, 1989, Kasparov beat Deep Thought handily in the two games. Chess-playing calculators emerged in the late 1970s but it would be another decade before a team of Carnegie Mellon University graduate students built the first computer-called Deep Thought-to beat a grand master in a regular tournament game. The reality of what transpired in the months and years leading up to that fateful match in May 1997, however, was actually more evolutionary than revolutionary-a Rocky Balboa–like rise filled with intellectual sparring matches, painstaking progress and a defeat in Philadelphia that ultimately set the stage for a triumphant rematch.Ĭomputer scientists had for decades viewed chess as a meter stick for artificial intelligence. The supercomputer’s success against an incredulous Garry Kasparov sparked controversy over how a machine had managed to outmaneuver a grand master, and incited accusations-by Kasparov and others-that the company had cheated its way to victory.

Twenty years ago IBM’s Deep Blue computer stunned the world by becoming the first machine to beat a reigning world chess champion in a six-game match.

Deep blue chess play