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Garry Kasparov

Original nameGarry Kasparov

Russian Chess World Champion, Defeated by "Deep Blue"

The Names Remembered · Small Roles, Famous Names

The 1997 Match Against IBM Deep BlueChess World ChampionA Landmark Figure in the History of Human-Machine Play

Who they are

Garry Kasparov (1963– ) is a Russian chess grandmaster who in 1985 became the youngest chess world champion in history, long holding the world number-one ranking. In 1997 he played a world-watched six-game match against IBM’s chess computer "Deep Blue," at last losing by two wins, one loss, and three draws, the first time a top human player lost to a computer in a formal match, a defeat thereafter widely seen as one of the most symbolic milestone events in the history of AI. After the match Kasparov questioned whether IBM had improperly intervened during the games, and the two sides disputed it, but he thereafter gradually shifted his attitude, publicly saying the defeat prompted him to rethink the relation between human and machine intelligence, and advocated "human-machine collaboration" (the "centaur" mode of play combining a human player with computer-assisted analysis), an idea thereafter proven able to surpass the performance of pure human or pure machine alone.

Primary sourcesThe official record of the IBM Deep Blue match (1997)

Key stories

A Thirty-Two-Move Game That Rewrote History

In the sixth game of that 1997 match against Deep Blue, Kasparov made in the opening a move thereafter widely thought a clear mistake, and resigned actively after only nineteen moves, the whole game taking under an hour, and this decisive collapse made the global audience for the first time truly realize that AI, in this field previously seen as the symbol of the peak of human intellect, already had the strength to surpass the world’s strongest player, this event thereafter a classic case mentioned in almost any discussion of "AI milestones."

Version differences

After the match Kasparov questioned whether IBM had improperly intervened during the games, IBM denied the charge, and the two sides’ accounts differ; this site states the existence of this dispute without adjudicating who is right.

Relationships

Ally

🪨Lee Sedol　The two are the representative human champions beaten by AI in chess and Go respectively, often mentioned together

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

A pioneering case of the "human-machine play" narrativeThis match thereafter became a classic case mentioned in almost any discussion of "AI milestones," providing the earliest public reference for the similar narrative of AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol two decades later.

Appears in

Human-Machine Play and the Practical Turn of Machine LearningDeep Blue Beats Kasparov

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