Beating The Computer

Beating the computer…sound impossible. Well for most of us, it probably is. Garry Kasparov would be the exception to that statement. Still, it was not a common event…even for Kasparov. On February 10, 1996, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Kasparov was beaten by a computer called Deep Blue in the first game of a six-game match, marking the first time a computer had ever beat a human in a formal chess game. Prior to that time, most likely no one had programmed a computer to really play chess. So, it was experimental. Since that time, computers have improved significantly, and today they can easily surpass scores of 3500, while the current all-time human record is 2882. Not being a chess player, I can’t exactly say that that I know about the scoring system.

Being beaten at chess was not something Kasparov took kindly to. After all, he was a world class player. Nobody was supposed to beat him, much less a machine. He could hardly stand it. It became an obsession. He was determined to beat the computer. Then, on February 17th…the final day of the tournament, Kasparov actually beat Deep Blue. It was the final game of a six-game match, and IBM’s chess-playing computer finally lost. Kasparov won the match, 4-2. While he had his victory, the sweetness of it was short lived, because the following year, in a widely publicized rematch, Deep Blue once again went on to defeat Kasparov.

Kasparov was born April 13, 1963, in the Russian republic of Azerbaijan. In 1985, at 22, Kasparov became the youngest world champion in history when he defeated Anatoly Karpov. The computer, Deep Blue can also be traced back to 1985, when Feng Hsiung Hsu, a Carnegie Mellon University doctoral student, began developing a chess-playing computer called “ChipTest,” which later became known as “Deep Thought,” after a machine in the science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. IBM saw value in Hsu and his collaborators, Murray Campbell, and Thomas Anantharaman, and later hired them, to continue to work on the chess-playing computer. Deep Thought evolved, but in 1989, Gary Kasparov easily trounced it when they met for a 2-game match. Not giving up, the IBM team continued to refine their supercomputer. In 1993, it was renamed “Deep Blue,” a combination of Deep Thought and Big Blue, which was IBM’s nickname.

“Deep Blue” was capable of evaluating 100 million different chess positions per second. Nevertheless, the IBM team wasn’t sure how the computer would perform in competition and Kasparov was favored to win. How odd is it that a man was favored to win over a computer. Still, it was so. In a frustrating turn of events, Kasparov lost the first game to “Deep Blue.” Not to be outdone, he came back and won the second game. The third and fourth games ended in a draw, and Kasparov won the fifth game. On February 17, the human chess master triumphed over Deep Blue in the sixth game and took the match, with a final score of 4-2. Of course, computers have evolved over the years, and these days it is believed that no human cam beat the computer. I guess time will tell if that is the case. As for Kasparov, well, he retained his world chess champion title until 2000. In March 2005, he announced his retirement from professional chess.