On this date in 1996, world chess champion Garry Kasparov lost the first game of his match against IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, and it genuinely rattled the world. At the time, chess was seen as the ultimate human thinking game. Strategy, intuition, creativity. And suddenly, a machine beat the best player alive. What’s wild is that Deep Blue wasn’t “thinking” like modern AI, it was brute force. It could analyze about 200 million possible moves per second, far beyond any human brain. Kasparov still won the match overall in ’96, but the message was clear: computers had crossed a line. Just one year later, in 1997, Deep Blue would defeat Kasparov in a full match, and that moment is often cited as the birth of modern AI anxiety and optimism. Fast-forward to today, and we casually ask our phones for directions, let algorithms pick our music, and use AI tools without a second thought. Back then, this felt like science fiction. Now? It’s just Tuesday.
Below is a recreation of the match Kasparov had against Deep Blue. Check it out!
