Background information
When the best chess player was no longer a man
by David Lee
Retro news: World chess champion Kasparov loses to IBM computer
10.2.2024
Translation: machine translated
Until 1996, humans were thought to be the better chess players. But in February, a computer defeated a world chess champion in a tournament for the first time.
On 10 February 1996, a world chess champion was defeated by a computer in an official tournament for the first time: Garry Kasparov, regarded as one of the best players of all time, was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue. It was the first of six games in a tournament under competitive conditions, which lasted until 17 February.
In chess, even computers cannot calculate all possible move combinations due to the large number of possible moves. This is why humans and their creativity were long regarded as superior, even though computers can calculate incomparably more moves in the shortest possible time. Kasparov's defeat in the first game therefore went down in chess history - although he still managed to win the tournament in the end with three wins, two draws and one loss.
A year later, there was a rematch: an improved Deep Blue took on Kasparov again - and won. My colleague David has written a detailed background to this:
Deep Blue, the supercomputer
Deep Blue was developed in 1985 as a pure chess computer. In contrast to today's adaptive chess computers, its strength was pure computing power: it calculated an average of 126 million chess positions - per second. However, pure computing power was not enough to defeat the human master: Deep Blue knew all the typical opening moves and also received analyses of all Kasparov's past public chess games in advance.
The programming also contained numerous instructions as to which move options should be analysed first: For example, whether the opponent's queen can be captured. This meant that it was not necessary to calculate all possible positions, but only those with the best prospects of winning.
Modern chess computers such as Google's AlphaZero use machine learning to teach themselves the most promising strategies. Humans no longer stand a chance against such systems.
If you are interested in "the game of kings" yourself, you will find what you are looking for in our shop. There are numerous chess games - both the classic version and with an integrated computer.
Header image: Shutterstock/Trump card
Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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