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On this day in New York · May 11, 1997

Kasparov Loses His Fighting Spirit

On the 35th floor of a Seventh Avenue office tower, the greatest chess player alive resigned to a machine after nineteen moves, and the world spent the next twenty years arguing about what had just happened.

Kasparov Loses His Fighting Spirit
Wikimedia Commons / Garry Kasparov

The facts

Date
May 11, 1997
Where
The Equitable Center, 787 Seventh Avenue, Midtown Manhattan
Final score
Deep Blue 3.5, Kasparov 2.5
After the loss
Kasparov demanded a rematch; IBM had already dismantled Deep Blue and refused

On May 11, 1997, Garry Kasparov sat down for the sixth and final game of his rematch against IBM's Deep Blue at the Equitable Center at 787 Seventh Avenue in Midtown, with the board itself on the 35th floor and a paying crowd watching on closed-circuit screens in the ground-floor auditorium. Kasparov, who had never lost a match in his career, steered into a shaky opening and resigned after just nineteen moves, the shortest game of the whole match. The loss gave Deep Blue the match, 3.5 to 2.5, and made it the first computer to beat a reigning world champion under standard tournament conditions. Kasparov later demanded a rematch, but IBM had already dismantled the machine and said no.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. I lost my fighting spirit.

    Garry Kasparov, on his decision to resign game six

    Source: History.com

  2. Everybody was surprised that he resigned because it didn't seem lost.

    Grandmaster John Fedorowicz, on Kasparov's resignation

    Source: History.com

Why it still matters

It was the moment a machine stopped being a sparring partner for chess and became the benchmark, and the argument it kicked off over what a computer actually understands versus what it just calculates still runs under every debate about AI today.

Sources

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