IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess for the first time.

Deep Blue was a supercomputer developed by IBM that made history by defeating Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion at the time, in a highly publicized chess match. The series of matches between Deep Blue and Kasparov took place in 1996 and 1997, marking significant milestones in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application in strategic decision-making tasks.

Development of Deep Blue: IBM began developing Deep Blue in the late 1980s as part of their efforts to explore the capabilities of AI in complex problem-solving domains. Deep Blue was specifically designed for playing chess and was a highly sophisticated computer system, capable of evaluating millions of positions per second and employing advanced algorithms for decision-making.

First Match (1996): The first official match between Deep Blue and Kasparov took place in Philadelphia in 1996. Deep Blue lost the match with Kasparov winning three games, drawing two, and losing one. However, this match marked the first time a reigning world chess champion competed against a computer under standard tournament conditions.

Rematch (1997): Following the defeat in 1996, IBM upgraded Deep Blue, enhancing its capabilities and refining its algorithms. In May 1997, Deep Blue and Kasparov faced off again in a highly anticipated rematch in New York City. This time, Deep Blue emerged victorious, winning the match with two wins, one loss, and three draws. This victory by a computer over the world chess champion was a groundbreaking moment in the history of AI and computer science.

Significance: Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov had profound implications for both AI research and public perception. It demonstrated the potential of AI systems to excel in complex tasks previously thought to be exclusive to human intelligence. The match captured worldwide attention and sparked debates about the future role of AI in society, including its potential impact on industries, employment, and human creativity.

Legacy: The Deep Blue matches paved the way for further advancements in AI, inspiring researchers to explore new frontiers in machine learning, decision-making, and game theory. The techniques and algorithms developed for Deep Blue have since been applied to various fields beyond chess, including finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity.

Kenyan soldiers kill an estimated 5000 ethnic Somali Kenyans in the Wagalla massacre.

HMS Dreadnought, the first of a revolutionary new breed of battleships, is christened

The communications satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.

Kenyan soldiers kill an estimated 5000 ethnic Somali Kenyans in the Wagalla massacre.

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Tom and Jerry make their debut with Puss Gets the Boot.

Tom and Jerry, two of the most successful cartoon characters in film and TV history, made their debut in cinemas on this day in 1940.

The cat and mouse who fight a seemingly never-ending battle for supremacy were featured in the animated short Puss Gets the Boot, made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoons by legendary animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

In the nine-minute short, Tom, a blue-grey long-haired cat, is happily toying with small brown mouse Jerry, when he is threatened with being thrown out of his owner’s house if he causes any more breakages.

Jerry then causes as much mayhem as he can to land Tom in trouble – a storyline that would provide a template for most of the duo’s adventures – and is left to celebrate when Tom is inevitably turfed out by his owner.

The cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award that year, but lost out to another MGM short. Hanna and Barbera felt they had a winning formula, which they returned to – but only after animator John Carr suggested renaming the main characters Tom and Jerry.

hey were rewarded when Yankee Doodle Mouse finally won them an Oscar for best cartoon in 1943 – the first of seven wins for their feisty cat and mouse duo.

Hanna and Barbera would write and direct a total of 114 short Tom and Jerry cartoons before MGM closed their animation department in 1957 – but the pugnacious puss and his artful mouse adversary remained popular, and would return in adventures made by other studios for many years to come.

The IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeats Garry Kasparov in chess.

Deep Blue and Kasparov played each other on two occasions. The first match began on 10 February 1996, in which Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. The match concluded on 17 February 1996.

Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on 11 May. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

The system derived its playing strength mainly from brute force computing power. It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30 nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor, enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer according to the TOP500 list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark.

The Deep Blue chess computer that defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations. David Levy and Monty Newborn estimate that one additional ply increases the playing strength 50 to 70 Elo points.

Deep Blue’s evaluation function was initially written in a generalized form, with many to-be-determined parameters. The optimal values for these parameters were then determined by the system itself, by analyzing thousands of master games. The evaluation function had been split into 8,000 parts, many of them designed for special positions. In the opening book there were over 4,000 positions and 700,000 grandmaster games. The endgame database contained many six piece endgames and five or fewer piece positions. Before the second match, the chess knowledge of the program was fine tuned by grandmaster Joel Benjamin. The opening library was provided by grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorowicz, and Nick de Firmian. When Kasparov requested that he be allowed to study other games that Deep Blue had played so as to better understand his opponent, IBM refused. However, Kasparov did study many popular PC games to become familiar with computer game play in general.

Writer Nate Silver suggests that a bug in Deep Blue’s software led to a seemingly random move which Kasparov misattributed to “superior intelligence”. Subsequently, Kasparov experienced a drop in performance due to anxiety in the following game.

Eight people a killed in a fire at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel/Casino

The aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne collides with and sinks the destroyer HMAS Voyager off the south coast of New South Wales. Eighty two people were killed.