Flashback Friday - 1994 Pentium computer beats world chess champ Garry Kasparov

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Computers continue to get smarter and more sophisticated.   We now live in a world of smart homes, self driving cars, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.  Robots make things in factories, self serve kiosks at restaurants are available to order food and robot vacuums even clean our floors.  That being said, in 1994 the Pentium computer was able beat a world chess champion Garry Kasparov.  Now that is an achievement...



Source: Wikipedia

Kasparov started chess from the age of 7 and attended Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school training under coach Vladimir Makogonov.  Kasparov won the Soviet Junior Championship in Tbilisi in 1976 at age 13.

Source: Wikipedia


By age 15 he had qualified for the Soviet Chess Championship in 1978.  Over the years, he won many championships and competitions and by January 1984, Kasparov became the No. 1 ranked player in the world. But in 1994 the Pentium computer was able beat Kasparov in a game of chess.  In 1994 at the Intel World Chess Grand Prix in London, Kasparov lost in the first round to computer running a Pentium processor and a program called Chess Genius, written by Richard Lang.  

So who is the better chess player?  Kasparov? Chess Genius?  Lang? or the Pentium?  I'll leave that up to you to decide!

Now lets hear it for the advancement of computers, but hoping they never outgrow us and take over the world :)



#RookieGuru
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