IBM's Deep Blue won a chess game against Garry Kasparov in 1996, although Kasparov went on to win the match. The next year, an improved version of Deep Blue won 3.5 - 2.5 in a rematch, although IBM have been accused of cheating through human intervention. The fact that they subsequently dismantled the machine and never released its logs for the match would seem to add some weight to this claim.
Today's chess computers are hundreds of times more powerful than Deep Blue, but operate in a fundamentally different manner to a human chess player - they brute force all possible move combinations to a given depth, assigning a numerical score to each move and selecting the move with the highest score. Whilst this works extremely effectively for sharp tactical positions, they are generally bad at long term strategy.
Today's chess computers are hundreds of times more powerful than Deep Blue, but operate in a fundamentally different manner to a human chess player - they brute force all possible move combinations to a given depth, assigning a numerical score to each move and selecting the move with the highest score. Whilst this works extremely effectively for sharp tactical positions, they are generally bad at long term strategy.
