While a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, Feng-hsiung Hsu began development of a chess-playing supercomputer under the name ChipTest.

[2][3] After receiving his doctorate in 1989, Hsu and Murray Campbell joined IBM Research to continue their project to build a machine that could defeat a world chess champion.

[4] Their colleague Thomas Anantharaman briefly joined them at IBM before leaving for the finance industry and being replaced by programmer Arthur Joseph Hoane.

Deep Blue won the deciding game after Kasparov failed to secure his position in the opening, thereby becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

[21] David Levy and Monty Newborn estimate that each additional ply (half-move) of forward insight increases the playing strength between 50 and 70 Elo points.

[20] Subsequently, Kasparov experienced a decline in performance in the following game,[23] though he denies this was due to anxiety in the wake of Deep Blue's inscrutable move.

[27] The rules allowed the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play that were revealed during the course of the match.

[3] Deep Blue is also responsible for the popularity of using games as a display medium for artificial intelligence, as in the cases of IBM Watson or AlphaGo.

[38] In a November 2006 match between Deep Fritz and world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, the program ran on a computer system containing a dual-core Intel Xeon 5160 CPU, capable of evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average depth of 17 to 18 plies (half-moves) in the middlegame thanks to heuristics; it won 4–2.

The system combines its searching ability of 200 million chess positions per second with summary information in the extended book to select opening moves.

It was a massively parallel IBM RS/6000 SP Supercomputer with 30 PowerPC 604e processors and 480 custom 600 nm CMOS VLSI "chess chips" designed to execute the chess-playing expert system, as well as FPGAs intended to allow patching of the VLSIs (which ultimately went unused) all housed in two cabinets.

[49][50][51][52] In 1997, Deep Blue was upgraded again to become the 259th most powerful supercomputer according to the TOP500 list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the parallel high performance LINPACK benchmark.