Deep Blue wins a game against Kasparov

In Philadelphia a machine won a game against a reigning world champion at classical time control for the first time, and lost the match 2-4.

Why it matters

A single game fell a year before the match: the threshold was crossed gradually rather than in one jump.

Kasparov lost the first game on 10 February, then readjusted and won three of the next five. In Time he called the machine's first pawn sacrifice "wonderful and extremely human" and titled his essay "The Day That I Sensed a New Kind of Intelligence". IBM substantially strengthened the machine within the year, and it won the 1997 rematch. The atlas has 1997 as evt-0056; this record shows that the result was not sudden.

Event record

Event date

February 10, 1996 – February 17, 1996

Timeline date

Event date

Verification

Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026

Lines

ID

evt-0175

The Philadelphia match, 10-17 February 1996; the machine won the first game on 10 February.

Sources

primary The Day That I Sensed a New Kind of Intelligence (Garry Kasparov)
TIME, 25 March 1996 (Wayback Machine copy) · Published March 1996
secondary Deep Blue
IBM
secondary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue (Corey S. Powell)
Scientific American, 21 April 1997 (copy at the Computer History Museum) · Published April 1997

Related events

Earlier

Enables Hsu's chess chip: from ChipTest to Deep Blue 1986links to this record
The Deep Blue that won a game from Kasparov in 1996 ran on 216 chess chips of the same project's next generation.
- Deep Blue (Murray Campbell, A. Joseph Hoane Jr., Feng-hsiung Hsu), authors' preprint dated 1 August 2001 of Artificial Intelligence 134 (2002) 57-83 · Authors' preprint (hosted on sjeng.org)

Later

Enables Deep Blue defeats Kasparov 1997
The 1996 match is the earlier, lost round of the same contest.
- Deep Blue · IBM