It was a TKO - a technological knockout.
Machine defeated man on Sunday, when Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov conceded victory to IBM's Deep Blue computer in the final game of their six-game rematch after only 19 moves."Obviously this has a psychological effect," the exhausted 34-year-old chess champion said after losing the first match in his life. "I am a human being. . . . I proved vulnerable."
The final score was 31/2 points to 21/2 points.
Kasparov won the first match against Deep Blue in February 1996 by 4 points to 2. But after that defeat, IBM engineers retooled Big Blue, returning with a machine that was able to think twice as fast as its predecessor.
"One hundred years from now, people will say this day was the beginning of the Information Age," said C.J. Tan, head of the Deep Blue team. "Historically for mankind, this is like landing on the moon or being the first human to climb Mount Everest."
Kasparov and Big Blue split the first two games of the match, then played to draws in Games 3, 4 and 5.
Kasparov resigned Game 6 on Sunday after the computer's 19th move. Despite his loss, Kasparov takes home a loser's purse of $400,000. IBM keeps its winner's share of $700,000 and said it will put the money toward continued research.
The Deep Blue team will also get the $100,000 Fredkin Prize, established 17 years ago at Carnegie Mellon University to be given the first time a computer beat a world chess champion in a match.
Early work on computers and chess was done at Carnegie Mellon in the late 1950s, spurring computer science professor Herbert Simon to predict in 1957 that within 10 years, a computer would beat the top human chess player.
"Let's see: I was only off by a factor of four," Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "That's better than the weatherman does, isn't it?"
After Kasparov resigned, he shrugged and bolted from the table, visibly upset. At a news conference later, he lashed out at IBM for programming the computer specifically to beat him.
"It was nothing to do about science. It was one zeal to beat Garry Kasparov," he said. "And when a big corporation with unlimited resources would like to do so, there are many ways to achieve the result. And the result was achieved.
"I feel confident that the machine hasn't proved anything yet," Kasparov added. "It's not yet ready, in my opinion, to win a big contest."
Kasparov was alluding to a contest involving other players as well as himself.