It's encouraging to see that Kasparov framed his famous tournament as "programmer vs. machine" rather than "man vs. machine." In hindsight, it's easy to chalk Deep Blue's victory up to computational inevitability, but there was some seriously cool engineering going on behind the scenes. Deep Blue was a purpose-built chess machine: a 30-node RS/6000 supercomputer controlling 480 custom chess chips. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of research at IBM.