Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine on AllMovie

In 1984, Garry Kasparov became the talk of serious chess aficionados around the world when he unexpectedly defeated grand master Anatoly Karpov to win the game's world championship, and he was still the leading player in chess when, in 1996, he was invited to participate in a series of matches with Deep Blue, a supercomputer developed by IBM and designed by Murray Campbell and Feng Hsuing-Tsu. Campbell and Hsuing-Tsu had worked side by side with master chess player Joel Benjamin to create a machine that could compete with the top human chess experts, and while Kasparov easily bested Deep Blue in their first tournament, it was a different story a year when he returned for a rematch. In the second game of the series, Kasparov was so roundly defeated that the champion began suggesting IBM was the computer as a decoy for a human player, and what started as a friendly exercise between Deep Blue's designers and the champion became an increasingly ugly battle of egos with many viewing the event as a publicity stunt used to prop up IMB's sagging public image. Documentary filmmaker Vikram Jayanti explores this story and its undercurrents in Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, which offers an in depth look at the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue controversy. This feature was premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival.