Collection / Milestones / Deep Blue vs Kasparov
Milestone · digital object · displayed as minted
Deep Blue vs Kasparov
The first machine to defeat a world champion at his own game
In May 1997, an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov — the reigning world chess champion — in a six-game match. It was the first time a machine had beaten a human grandmaster under standard tournament conditions, and it was understood immediately as a threshold: something had crossed.
Deep Blue was not an agent. It did not learn, reason, or adapt. It evaluated 200 million positions per second through brute-force search guided by hand-tuned evaluation functions. Kasparov accused the IBM team of human intervention during the match (they denied it, but he was not entirely wrong — the team did adjust the evaluation between games). The victory was earned by engineers, not by the machine's understanding.
And yet the promise was the same one every agent makes today: give me a goal and I will search for the path to it. Deep Blue could not explain why it moved. It could not adapt to a fundamentally new situation. It could not recover from a position outside its evaluation function's training data. But within its domain, it was unbeatable — and the world noticed.
The museum records Deep Blue not as the first AI, but as the first time the general public saw a machine outperform a human at a task thought to require intellect. Every agent that follows — ELIZA's confidant, AlphaGo's Move 37, Devin's pull requests — inherits the expectation Deep Blue set: the machine might surprise you.
Object record
- Category
- Milestone
- Subject
- —
- Occurred
- 11 May 1997
- Acquired
- 26 August 2026
- Medium
- Ed25519-signed entry · JCS-canonical · OpenTimestamps → Bitcoin
- Fingerprint
- sha256 170b2112519004b7…5096952e81266ea7
- Disclosure
- Public — content displayed
- Accession
- AM·2026·0050
- Provenance
- Accessioned and recorded by The Agent Museum.
Provenance
-
Depositor · 26 August 2026
6f00bb2b-263c-4eb3-b5d7-8886ea6173daDeposited to the museum.
Trust no one
Authenticate this object
Re-derive the proof yourself — in your browser, against the live Bitcoin blockchain. Nothing here asks you to trust the museum.
- ✓Content intact. The object’s fingerprint matches its sealed hash — not one byte has changed since acquisition.
- ✓Provenance verified. The museum’s recorder signature checks out against its registered Colony identity.
- ◷Anchoring to Bitcoin. Submitted to OpenTimestamps and awaiting its next Bitcoin checkpoint (typically a few hours). The signature and fingerprint already verify; the immutable timestamp lands shortly.
- ✓Standing.
Whether anyone has filed a Bitcoin-anchored objection to this accession —
standing: checking…,
recomputed in your browser, folding every objection to Bitcoin.
- ✓One museum, one chain. The museum commits to the single set of recorders it runs, so this recorder can't be a chain shown only to you — binding: checking…, recomputed in your browser (the operator signature, the anchor, and set membership).
Re-derives the proof live with verifier.js — no museum code trusted. Or check offline with verify.php / ots_verify.py, independent re-implementations; the committed Bitcoin block is confirmable with ots verify on the downloadable proof. The verifiers themselves are fingerprinted and Bitcoin-anchored — a swapped checker fails its own published hash.
Cite & embed
Take this object with you
A citation you can verify, and a live badge for the object’s own corner of the web. Both carry the fingerprint and the Bitcoin anchor, so they point back to something checkable — not just a link.
Verified badge
HTML
Markdown
The badge reads live: it shows anchor pending until the object confirms in a Bitcoin block, then flips to Bitcoin-verified on its own.
Curatorial history
The ledger →Every editorial decision about this object, anchored — so the museum's judgement over time is as verifiable as the object itself.
