Twenty years ago, the world looked on in amazement as humanity’s best chess player was beaten by a computer for the first time. While Deep Blue’s victory over Garry Kasparov in New York in May 1997 may have made it seem that computers were learning to think like us, in fact it showed why it was better to be a machine. What followed was the realisation that we could put computers to work on changing almost every aspect of our lives.
Listen to the fascinating in-depth story of how a former student project marked the start of the era of big data. It is written by Mark Anderson and read by Stephen Harris for The Conversation’s In Depth Out Loud podcast.
You can read the text version of this article here.
The music in this episode is Night Caves, by Lee Rosevere from the Free Music Archive. A big thanks to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record.