The 1997 Chess Game With Garry Kasparov That Thrust AI Into Spotlight

Developers at IBM, the US firm that made Deep Blue, were ecstatic with the victory but quickly refocused on the wider significance

With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.

May 11, 1997 was a watershed for the relationship between man and machine, when the artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved what developers had been promising for decades.

It was an "incredible" moment, AI expert Philippe Rolet told AFP, even if the enduring technological impact was not so huge.

"Deep Blue's victory made people realise that machines could be as strong as humans, even on their territory," he said.