Computer chess: how the ancient game revolutionised AI

Tue 19 May 2020 06.14 EDT Last modified on Tue 19 May 2020 06.16 EDT When legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov found himself beaten by IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, it was seen as a seminal moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. It was New York, 1997 and for the first time ever a computer had beaten a world champion under tournament conditions. This was the culmination of a journey in which the first stirrings of what we now call artificial intelligence and machine learning were born. A road trodden by war heroes and student researchers alike, whose singular desire to create a program that could beat the very best in the world would shape an entire science. Early origins Chess lends itself well to computer programming.