In Philadelphia, world champion Garry Kasparov beats the Deep Blue supercomputer in a chess match.

Philadelphia, colloquially referred to as Philly, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is the sixth-most populous city in the United States with a population of 1.6 million at the 2020 census, while the Philadelphia metropolitan area with 6.33 million residents is the nation's ninth-largest metropolitan area. Philadelphia is known for its culture, cuisine, and history, maintaining contemporary influence in business and industry, culture, sports, and music.

Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion (1985–2000), political activist and writer. His peak FIDE chess rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. From 1984 until his retirement from regular competitive chess in 2005, Kasparov was ranked the world's No. 1 player for a record 255 months overall. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories (15) and Chess Oscars (11).

Deep Blue was a customized IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer for chess-playing. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it won one, drew two, and lost three games. It was upgraded in 1997, and in a six-game re-match it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films.

A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, exascale supercomputers have existed which can perform over 10¹⁸ FLOPS. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10¹¹) to tens of teraFLOPS (10¹³). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.