In 1997, beating the world chess champion took four hundred and eighty chess chips fabricated for that one task, and thirty nodes to drive them. In 2023, a program that plays Go better than any human runs on a single graphics card.
On the other side of the table, in every one of those matches, sat one person running on twenty watts, who could not be copied, could not resume from a saved position and had to sleep. The two columns are quantities of different kinds, and only one of them has been falling for forty years. This site is both columns.
F.-h. Hsu, IEEE Micro 19(2), 1999, for the Deep Blue configuration. Twenty watts: M. Raichle, D. Gusnard, PNAS 99(16), 2002. All nine matches are taken apart on the Nine Matches page.
Red is the human side, blue the machine. The bars are powers of ten, and what is counted is whatever the source actually published — nodes for Watson, processors for Pluribus, chips for AlphaGo. The unit is printed on every row, because normalising them would mean inventing a core count for a 1979 PDP-10. The last row has no bar at all: nobody published what the 2023 bots ran on. The tag beside a figure says how good it is; sources and boundaries are on each match's own passport.
What actually stood across the table in each game, and what does the same work today →
The watt league — how many watts each machine drew and how many a person at the board draws — and why the two figures are so hard to set side by side.
What winning cost — what the win cost in the money of its own year: four of the fourteen have a figure, and for the rest nobody ever published one.
The latency of a thought — your own reaction, measured here and read back in the clock ticks of processors since 1971 — a tick being no operation, and a reaction no thought.
From 2005 to 2009 this domain ran a site of logic games built on Java applets — the same green background, the same yellow cards. The applets have not run in a browser since 2017, but the counter that stood on that front page survived intact.
The score that stood here for twenty years: You 14,757 — Comp 11,763
From the old site's stat.txt: 274,451 games across nine titles, 244,955 of them minesweeper. The front-page score counted the five games where the machine was an opponent rather than a timer. The site is kept in the archive.