2024-04-14 20:22:37
Text: Editorial Cuba Noticias 360
The date went unnoticed by the Cuban sports press but this February 10, 25 years ago, a historic page was recorded in world chess: the world champion Garry Kasparov lost a game against a computer. It wasn’t just any computer. She was meticulously built to play, named Deep Blue, and starred in a six-game series at the Philadelphia Convention Center against one of the greatest players in history.
In 1996, personal computers were becoming a more affordable product in the United States, but in many other parts of the world the reality was different. USB had just been released and it would be another five years before Windows XP made its way onto the market.
“But Deep Blue was no ordinary computer. He was a giant built with the sole intention of being very good at chess. And he accomplished that mission,” recalls this Wednesday edition of “Slate.”
This day a world monarch lost a game against a computer for the first time in history but the Russian would win the match four games to two. In May 1997, an improved Deep Blue would defeat him 3½ – 2½.
However, the ’96 game showed that the world of chess was beginning to change with the increase in automation and the digital universe. Although history already recorded other attempts. Some version of computers had tried their hand at chess even before the emergence of artificial intelligence as an official field in the 1950s.
Alan Turing, the famous cryptographer, had developed a handwritten chess algorithm in 1950 called “Turochamp.” In 1957, Alex Bernstein, a Bronx researcher and game science enthusiast, created the first complete chess program with the help of several of his IBM colleagues. In 1988, students at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, developed a sophisticated chess computer called Deep Thought. In January of that year, Deep Thought became the first computer to beat a grandmaster in regular tournament play when he triumphed over Denmark’s Bent Larsen.
In October 1989, Kasparov won, resulting in the seven-year “thinking tank” team creating the 2,800-pound Deep Blue, capable of processing 200 million movements per second, according to IBM.
“This produced a chess machine that was stronger than any of its automated predecessors, and the outside world was stunned by the end result: a human had been surpassed by a machine in this game of intellect, ingenuity and judgment,” noted one media outlet. American online.
In the 1997 series, Kasparov and Deep Blue faced each other face to face in front of numerous television cameras and a large crowd, a match that focused the attention of the planet, which today is experiencing a fever of virtual chess games between different corners. of the world.