On February 10, world chess champion Garry Kasparov, 32, took on an unusual challenger. His opponent weighed 1,400 pounds, did not speak and never even showed up in Philadelphia for the match. What kind of chess player is that? The IBM chess-playing computer, Deep Blue.
Each of Kasparov's moves traveled across phone lines to the Deep Blue supercomputer in Yorktown Heights, New York, 100 miles away.
Deep Blue can sort through 50 billion chess positions in three minutes. (A person can think through fewer than 600 moves in that time.) Once the computer figured out its best move, a programmer at the match moved the chess piece.
Kasparov was amazed and upset when Deep Blue won the first game of the six-game tournament! He decided his best weapon was imagination, which no computer has. The computer sorts rapidly through moves programmed into its brain. But Kasparov used his imagination to guess the computer's strategy.
"I'm tired from these games," Kasparov said. "If I were playing a normal, human match, my opponent would also be exhausted."
Finally, his imagination beat the computer's strength. Kasparov won, 4-2, and took home a $400,000 prize. But computer programmers are inventing even stronger chess computers. Do you think they can create one that will outthink a person?