Deep Blue

Deep Blue was a chess-playing supercomputer built by IBM that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997. It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second. While not a robot in the physical sense, Deep Blue was a watershed moment for artificial intelligence in the public consciousness. It proved that machines could outperform humans at a task requiring strategy, intuition, and deep thinking — or at least appear to. The defeat shook Kasparov and the world, raising fundamental questions about machine intelligence that still drive the AI industry. Deep Blue was also a masterwork of IBM marketing.