— Deep Blue t is 1997 and we are on the 39" story of the Equitable Center in New [« watching a chess match. It’s no ordinary match. Two men sit opposite each other. One, a neatly suited figure, stares intently at the board. You can almost see the heat rising from his head as he processes the possibilities before him. The other, sits implacably calm and, before each turn, looks to a screen at the side of the board, reads the instruction, and makes his move. This is the famous match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov, a child prodigy, became world chess champion at the age of fifteen and, to this day, holds the record for the highest chess ranking ever achieved. Some consider him one of the most intelligent people on the planet. His opponent, Deep Blue, is a massively parallel chess-playing computer built by IBM’s Watson Research Laboratory. The machine itself sits a few blocks north of the tournament in an air-conditioned room, and relays the moves over a phone line to Joe Hoane, the IBM researcher who moves the pieces. Six months earlier, in Philadelphia, Kasparov won against Deep Blue. This is the rematch and has generated a worldwide media frenzy. Tickets to the event are sold out and most news organizations give a blow-by- blow report each day. On the eighth day of the tournament Kasparov and Deep Blue are level pegging. Kasparov is playing an opening he knows well. It's one designed to be hard for computers to play and has been tested extensively against Fritz, a chess computer Grand Masters use for practice. But Deep Blue doesn’t seem fazed. Kasparov is visibly tired. On the 16 move he makes a dreadful blunder and sinks into despair. An hour later, after some moments of quiet contemplation, he tips over his HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015695