IBM's Deep Blue
In 1997 a match between IBM's Deep Blue and the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was taking place. Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion under tournament conditions. IBM loaded the computer with hundreds of thousands of grandmaster chess games. Deepblue was able to use brute force to evaluate up to 200 million moves per second! This is big data at work. IBM received a Carnegie Mellon University Fredkin prize, which in 1980 offered $100, 000 to the creators of the first computer to beat a world champion.
IBM Watson
In 2011, IBM's Watson beat the two best human Jeopardy! players in a $1 Million match. Watson simultaneously used hundreds of language-analysis techniques to locate answers in 200 million pages of content requiring 4TB of storage. Watson was trained with Machine Learning and reinforcement-learning techniques.
AlphaGo
Go, A Board game created in China thousands of years ago - is widely considered to be one of the most complex games ever invented with 10 power 170 possible board configurations. To give you a sense of how large a number that is, it's believed that there are between 10 power 78 and 10 power 87 atoms in the known universe. In 2015, AlphaGo created by Google's DeepMind group - used deep learning with two neural networks to beat the European Go champion Fan Hui. Go is considered to be far more complex than Chess.