deepblue

Deep Blue is a series of chess-playing computers developed by IBM in the 1990s. It originated from an earlier project at Carnegie Mellon University known as Deep Thought, led by Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell, and was acquired and redesigned by IBM. Deep Blue combined specialized hardware with software to perform deep, brute-force searches of chess positions, evaluating large numbers of possible moves and outcomes.

The system used a combination of custom hardware and general-purpose processors arranged in a highly parallel architecture, together with an optimized evaluation function and alpha-beta search. It relied on a large opening book and endgame databases to inform its play, and it employed careful software optimizations to maximize throughput on its hardware.

In 1996, a predecessor version of Deep Blue faced Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in New York and Kasparov won 4–2. In 1997, after substantial upgrades, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a six-game rematch by 3.5–2.5, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match with standard time controls. The victory drew widespread attention to artificial intelligence and the capabilities of specialized hardware in problem-solving tasks.

After the match, IBM retired the project and the Deep Blue hardware was eventually decommissioned. The work on Deep Blue influenced later developments in game-playing AI, parallel computing, and the broader study of AI systems that combine domain-specific hardware with optimized software.