Kasparov Beats the Machine — This Time
On February 17, 1996, Garry Kasparov won the final game against IBM's Deep Blue, taking their six-game Philadelphia match 4–2 and scoring humanity's last great stand before the rematch.
The machine had just humiliated the greatest chess mind on Earth — and he had one week to answer. On February 17, 1996, world champion Garry Kasparov struck back, winning the final game against IBM's Deep Blue and taking their six-game match 4–2.
The showdown began on February 10 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Deep Blue was an IBM supercomputer capable of evaluating 100 million chess positions per second. Its roots went back to 1985, when Carnegie Mellon doctoral student Feng-Hsiung Hsu began building a chess machine called ChipTest. Hsu and his colleagues later joined IBM, and the machine — renamed Deep Blue in 1993 — became the company's bid to conquer the royal game.
Across the board sat Kasparov, who had become the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985 at age 22. He was favored to win easily. Instead, Deep Blue won the first game — the first time a computer had ever beaten a reigning world champion in a classical game under tournament conditions. The chess world reeled.
Kasparov, famously tenacious, steadied himself. He won the second game, drew the third and fourth, and won the fifth. On February 17, playing White in the sixth and final game, he defeated the machine again and claimed the match 4–2. Humanity had held the line — for the moment.
The 1996 match also planted the seed of suspicion that would poison the sequel. Kasparov left Philadelphia convinced that Deep Blue's play had, at moments, felt uncannily human, and he said so publicly — a charge IBM denied.
The rematch came a year later in New York City. From May 3 to 11, 1997, an upgraded Deep Blue defeated Kasparov 3½–2½, clinching victory with a stunning 19-move final game. It was the first time a computer beat a reigning world champion in a full match, a moment later chronicled in the documentary "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine."
February 17, 1996 matters because it was the last stand of the human champion in the opening act of the man-versus-machine age. Kasparov's comeback showed that brilliance, nerve, and adaptability could still beat raw calculation — even as the 1997 rematch proved the machines were coming, and coming fast. The duel helped launch the era of artificial intelligence as a public spectacle.
Photo: Gideon Markowiz, CC BY 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons). Garry Kasparov at the chessboard during a simultaneous exhibition in Jerusalem.
