In 1996, IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a chess match with a supercomputer called Deep Blue. The computer operated by a team of 6 IBM programmers had the ability to calculate more than 100 million chess positions per second. Applying this massive computational power, Deep Blue won the first game of the match. Kasparov, however, defeated Deep Blue by a score of 4 games to 2 to win the match.
A year later, Kasparov accepted a rematch against an improved version of Deep Blue. This supercomputer uses 256 processors working together to calculate between 50 and 100 billion chess moves in under three minutes. Having won the first game, Kasparov, however, lost in the six-game chess match. Deep Blue II became the first computer to defeat a reigning world chess champion.
Nowadays, computers like Deep Blue are used to forecast the weather, to do drug and genetics research, to design clean-up plans for toxic waste and to power web servers on the Internet. Deep Blue serves as a prototype for future computers to be required to solve complex problems.