While much is known about Kasparov’s activities during the past year, the same cannot be said for Deep Blue. In the past year, Kasparov’s results have been improving, pushing his rating to an all-time high of 2820.
In addition, Kasparov was coming off a superb performance at the Linares tournament, where he scored 8.5/11 against the world’s elite grandmasters, including wins against the number 2 through 6 finishers in the event. Kasparov’s dominance at the end of the 1996 match convinced most experts to predict the champion to score four or more points out of six. Pre-match predictions were decidedly in Kasparov’s favor. The prize fund was set at the staggering amount of $1.1 million, $700,000 to the winner. It would be another six-game event, played under similar conditions to the previous match. With that kind of media presence, it was inevitable that there would be a re-match. The 1996 match reportedly generated over $250 million of “free favorable advertising” for IBM (to quote IBM). Were the match to continue, the expectation was that his dominance over Deep Blue would only grow. The consensus afterwards was that Kasparov grew in strength as the match progressed. He studied the program’s play, identified weaknesses in it, and used this to win three of the remaining five games (with two draws) to score a convincing match victory. After the match, Kasparov identified the first game as a critical wakeup call for him.
For the first time under tournament conditions, the world chess champion had lost to a computer. The very first game produced a stunning surprise, as Kasparov stumbled in an unbalanced position and went on to a historic defeat. The six-game match, played under tournament conditions, was contested for a prize fund of $500,000. Last year’s Kasparov – Deep Blue match was played in Philadelphia in February. The Deep Blue team spent seven long years preparing for a return match with Kasparov, which they eventually got in 1996. In 1989, Kasparov easily defeated the program - then named ‘Deep Thought’ - in a two-game, fast-play match. Kasparov versus Deep Blue: The Re-matchĭepartment of Mathematics and Computer Scienceġ081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands Preludeįor the third time, the computer chess community was privileged to witness a match between the human world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine.