After the victory over Kasparov, Deep Blue was retired to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. But IBM went on to develop new kinds of massively parallel computers such as Blue Gene and Watson. In 1999, IBM built on its experience with Deep Blue and launched the Deep Computing Institute, with the goal of harnessing advanced computing to solve complex technological and business problems.
Deep Blue has had an impact on computing in many industries. It gave developers insights into ways they could design computers to analyze a vast number of possible solutions to other complex problems. Deep Blue’s architecture has been applied widely in financial modeling, which requires a rapid evaluation of value and risk associated with many stocks and portfolios.
Computer breakthroughs inspired by Deep Blue have likewise been used in data mining to help discover unlikely patterns in large databases, using the tremendous speed and capacity of massively parallel supercomputers. Deep Blue has also made its mark in healthcare, helping the pharmaceutical industry to develop new drugs. Analyzing drug interactions on a molecular level requires massive amounts of processing and computational power, and advanced computers can cut the development time for drugs dramatically and reduce costs.
Although the technology behind Deep Blue has found many other applications, the computer will always be remembered for its historic victory against Kasparov. In terms of chess, Deep Blue was a game-changer — literally. “For the first time in the history of mankind, I saw something similar to an artificial intellect,” Kasparov said. “I know very few chess players who could take this heat.”
Added IBM’s C. J. Tan, “Garry prepared to play against a computer. But we programmed it to play like a grandmaster.”