Thinking machines had left the realm of sci-fi and entered the real world.
Often AI hype outpaced the actual capacities of anything those researchers could create. But in the last moments of the 20th century, significant AI advances started to rattle society at large. When IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Gary Kasparov, the game's reigning champion, the event seemed to signal not only a historic and singular defeat in chess history -- the first time that a computer had beaten a top player -- but also that a threshold had been crossed. Thinking machines had left the realm of sci-fi and entered the real world.