Garry Kasparov lost to the Deep Blue supercomputer in chess due to a computer malfunction

One of the greatest chess games of all time is, without a doubt, the battle of Garry Kasparov and the supercomputer Deep Blue from IBM in 1997. This was Kasparov’s second game with a supercomputer, a rematch of the car.

The first installment in the game was very difficult and intense, Kasparov had an advantage at first, but starting from move 44, he ceased to understand the logic of the machine’s game, and, in the end, lost the entire match. After some time, Kasparov even accused IBM engineers of “cheating”: manipulations with the software of the machine, which led to the defeat. After 17 years, the situation cleared up - Kasparov lost due to a malfunction in the algorithm of the computer in the very first batch of the whole battle.

What is Deep Blue?

At that time, Deep Blue was really a very powerful system. The supercomputer was a system with a 32-core (32-node) IBM POWER2 processor, each of which was connected to eight specialized VLSI chess processors running on the RS / 6000 server platform. The Deep Blue code was written in C, and IBM AIX was used as the operating system. Deep Blue, calculated 200 million positions per second, and its peak performance was 11.38 gigaflops.


A little about Deep Blue from its creator.

Work on the creation of specialized computer systems was carried out at IBM, starting in 1950. In 1985, the first computer to solve highly specialized chess problems appeared. It was built by Carnegie University graduate student Feng-hsiung Hsu, and this system is called ChipTest.

A little later, Murray Campbell, along with Feng-hsiung Hsu, began work on the creation of Deep Blue, becoming IBM employees. The first version of the system lost to Kasparov in 1989. The system received the second defeat from man in 1996. And already in 1997 all games were won by a machine.

Man lose car

On the 44th move of the critical game, Deep Blue made, by all accounts, a meaningless move: moved the rook from D5 to D1. This move did not give any prospects - neither positional nor any other. Kasparov won this game, but he no longer understood the logic of the computer , and passed the next two games (2nd and 6th), losing the whole battle.



Now it turned out that that move was a normal failure. Previously, IBM engineers programmed Deep Blue to take a safe move if something went wrong. And when this failure occurred, the computer simply moved the figure, instead of making a calculated positional move, which did not bring anything, neither strengthening nor weakening of positions.

So, a common computer error, a bug, led to the defeat of a man in the epoch-making chess battle “man versus machine”.

Based on this error, a documentary short film was shot, which can be watched here (the Habraparser does not skip pasting the code).