Deep Thought

Deep Thought was a computer chess-playing program developed by IBM. It was a significant step in the advancement of artificial intelligence in chess. By the late 1980s, Deep Thought was capable of evaluating up to 700,000 positions per second, a considerable leap from earlier programs that could only "see" a few moves ahead. This increased processing power allowed Deep Thought to defeat a grandmaster in a tournament game in 1988. While Deep Thought itself was a powerful system, it was the precursor to Deep Blue, which famously defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The progress in computer chess, exemplified by Deep Thought, was largely driven by improvements in computer engineering and processing power rather than solely by AI advancements.12