IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov

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IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov

Deep Blue was significantly brute-force beefed-up between the prototype and the winning machine, though.

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(Image credit: The IBM History Blog ) On December 5, 1995, IBM took the wraps off its Deep Blue prototype, a supercomputer designed to beat the world’s greatest chess players. IBM would manage to achieve its goal two years later, after a host of software and hardware revisions. In 1997, Deep Blue famously triumphed over an at-his-peak chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, during a rematch in New York City. The win was a turning point for IBM, who was increasingly characterized as a has-been, with a dire share price to match. It was also a cornerstone in the company's approach to computing, pivoting from mere chunks of hardware to ‘thinking systems.’

Interestingly, Deep Blue originated from work on a chess chip, which started a decade earlier at Carnegie Mellon University. That hardware research project was dubbed Deep Thought, which will tickle The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans.

The first Deep Blue prototype revealed consisted of “an IBM RS/6000 workstation with 14 chess search engines as slave processors,” says the Chess Programming Wiki . According to the source, the collective chess-power this first Deep Blue incarnation had at its disposal was enough to analyze “between 3 and 5 million positions per second.”

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  1. IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov
  2. IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov
  3. IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov
  4. IBM unveiled its Deep Blue chess supercomputer prototype 30 years ago today — two years later in its second attempt, it defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov

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