Ten years ago, Deep Blue beat a world chess champion. Now supercomputers are poised to move into the business world in a big wayOn May 11, it will have been 10 years since Deep Blue became the first machine to defeat a reigning world champion chess master under tournament rules. The eight-day, six-game match with Garry Kasparov drew the world's attention. It was parodied by late-night comics and in comic strips. It became fodder for folk singers, documentary producers, and book authors. Deep Blue, a machine built by IBM (IBM), was a pop star.
Things have changed in 10 years. Today, Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox 360 game console is more powerful than Deep Blue, and the real silicon speedsters only make headlines for the fleeting moment when they wear the title, "Fastest Supercomputer in the World."
Deep Blue was not the fastest computer in the world in 1997. On a list of the top 500 fastest computers, Deep Blue ranked a poky 388. Still, its 32 processors could handle about 11 billion calculations per second.
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