Before there was Watson, there was Deep Blue.

In 1997, Deep Blue, another computer built by I.B.M., defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match.

At the time, it was considered a stunning achievement and a significant step forward in the field of artificial intelligence. Some people said that a new era would be ushered in, one in which computers would perform many tasks  like air traffic control  that it once seemed only humans could do. That era has not quite materialized.

But almost 14 years later, chess programs running on an average desktop computer can play better than Deep Blue, making its victory no longer seem as implausible. And while the research that went into making Deep Blue has not itself transformed society, the lessons from designing and building it have had practical applications, said Murray S. Campbell, one of Deep Blue’s developers, who still works at I.B.M.

Playing chess was a “deep computing” problem, Dr. Campbell said, the kind that involves processing and analyzing large amounts of data. Based on what it learned from Deep Blue, I.B.M. created a Deep Computing Institute to analyze and solve complex computing problems, like those posed by credit card transactions, telephone call centers and weather analysis.