In the first ever traditional chess
match between a man (world champion Garry Kasparov)
and a computer (IBM's Deep Blue) in 1996, Deep Blue
won one game, tied two and lost three. The next
year, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a six-game
match -- the first time a reigning world champion
lost a match to a computer opponent in tournament
play. Deep Blue was a combination of special purpose
hardware and software with an IBM RS/6000 SP2 (seen
here) -- a system capable of examining 200 million
moves per second, or 50 billion positions, in the
three minutes allocated for a single move in a chess
game. (VV1001)