Garry Kasparov

Symbolic significance[edit]

Deep Blue's win was seen as very symbolically significant, a sign that artificial intelligence was catching up to human intelligence, and could defeat one of humanity's great intellectual champions.^[2] Later analysis tended to play down Kasparov's loss as a result of uncharacteristically bad play on Kasparov's part, and play down the intellectual value of chess as a game which can be defeated by brute force.^[3][4]

Deep Blue's victory switched the canonical example of a game where humans outmatched machines to the ancient Chinese game of Go, a game of simple rules and far more possible moves than chess, which requires more intuition and is less susceptible to brute force.^[5] Go is widely played in China, South Korea, and Japan, and was considered one of the four arts of the Chinese scholar in antiquity. Go programs were able to defeat only amateur players until 2015, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program surprisingly defeated Lee Sedol in the match AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol.^[6] While Deep Blue mainly relied on brute computational force to evaluate millions of positions, AlphaGo also relied on neural networks and reinforcement learning.

Summary[edit]