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Ashta’s chess tales

The machine that counted

New York, 1997 · 2 minute read

Two hundred years after the fake, a real machine sat down against the world champion.

In May 1997, in a tower in New York, the world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down to play six games against a computer called Deep Blue.

There was no man hidden inside this one. Deep Blue was two tall black cabinets built by the company IBM. It did not understand chess the way a person does. It counted. In a single second it could examine about two hundred million positions, following each move to see where it led.

Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of the machine the year before. This time the match was level after five games. In the sixth, Kasparov made an early mistake, and the machine did not forgive it. He resigned after only nineteen moves.

Deep Blue had won the match, three and a half points to two and a half. It was the first time a reigning world champion had lost a match to a computer under normal tournament conditions.

Today the chess program on an ordinary phone is far stronger than Deep Blue was. Players use these programs every day — not as opponents to fear, but as training partners that never get tired.

A machine does one thing very well: it checks every possibility, patiently. In the lab you can ask one to do exactly that for a piece you invent yourself.