Garry Kasparov, left, takes a pawn in the opening minutes of a chess game against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in Philadelphia on Feb. 10, 1996. Feng-hsiung Hsu, right, the principal designer of Deep Blue, keys a move into the computer. Tom Mihalek/AFP
Tom Mihalek/AFP
Could a machine outthink the best human mind in the world? Thirty years ago that was still an open question, but a historic matchup between a chess grandmaster and an IBM supercomputer answered it.
On a cold February day in 1996, hundreds of chess fans filed into the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. They clutched scorecards