In addition to deep search of possible moves, Deep Blue consults a database of opening games and endgames played by chess masters over the last 100 years.
Deep Blue's success is based on engineering rather than emulation. Even if it doesn't think like a human, it is relevant to business applications that require rapid management of large amounts of data.
Deep Blue is the descendent of earlier work by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University.
Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, and Andreas Nowatzyk (1990)and IBM (1998).