IBM Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
Confirmed
Importance: historic (5 of 5)The takeaway
IBM’s Deep Blue won a six-game rematch against reigning world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5, the first defeat of a world champion by a computer under standard tournament time controls.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Historic (5 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Final game played 11 May 1997 in New York
- Score: 3.5–2.5 to Deep Blue
- Used massively parallel brute-force search with custom chess chips
- Kasparov had won the first match in 1996 (4–2)
What happened
In a rematch in New York, Deep Blue beat Kasparov, winning the decisive sixth game.
Why it matters
A landmark public moment for AI, though achieved by specialized search rather than learning — a contrast with AlphaGo/AlphaZero two decades later.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- IBM: Deep Blueibm.com, official
Reactions
- Wikipedia: Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparoven.wikipedia.org, discussion
Changes
- Filed