On this day in 1996, the IBM chess-playing computer Deep Blue played chess master Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. This was the first time a computer had played against a human in a full six-game regulation match.

The computer won just two of the six games, including the first. The match was successful in drawing public attention to the work being done in computing and artificial intelligence, with about 6 million people tuning in through the internet.

Deep Blue was developed at Carnegie Mellon University specifically to defeat a human chess champion. It was capable of evaluating 200 million possible moves per second. At present, computers regularly beat humans at chess and are sometimes used more as practice partners than competitors; today’s chess computers rely on software instead of specialized chess hardware. Today, the greater challenge for game-playing computers is go, at which a computer defeated a human champion this year.

Kasparov and an upgraded Deep Blue faced off again in 1997, at which time the computer won the six-game match with a score of 3.5 to 2.5.