To Compute: Deep Blue and Brute Force

Before a machine could think, it first had to prove it could out-calculate a human: brute force over insight.

Key Milestones

• Turing's theoretical foundation, 1950. Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" posed the question of whether a machine could think, and proposed a practical test for judging the answer.
• Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, May 1997. IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a full match under standard tournament rules.

The Energy, Social, and Economic Impact of Compute

Deep Blue won through raw calculation: 200 million chess positions evaluated every second, and 11.38 billion floating-point operations per second. IBM's own first supercomputer, the Stretch, introduced in 1961, had managed well under 500. On those figures, IBM's own hardware gained roughly twenty million times the computing power in thirty-six years, applied, in this case, to a single chessboard.

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Kasparov's loss was not proof that a machine could think. It was proof that, given enough energy converted into raw calculation, a machine could out-compute a human at a narrow, well-defined task: the same arbitrage this series has been tracking, now applied to judgment instead of grain, iron, or a message.