Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of "The Age of Intelligent Machines", there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was often unreliable outside academic, military, corporate and other heavily invested settings, difficult for non-technical users to use, and mostly lacking a broad range
1997 Champion Hurdle 1997 Champion Hurdle The 1997 Champion Hurdle was a horse race held at Cheltenham Racecourse on Tuesday 11 March 1997. It was the 68th running of the Champion Hurdle. The winner was Peter Deal's Make A Stand, a six-year-old chestnut gelding trained in Devon by Martin Pipe and ridden by A. P. McCoy. Make A Stand's victory was a first in the race for both jockey and owner: Pipe had previously won the race with Granville Again in 1993. Make A Stand, formerly a moderate flat racer, but the winner of his last four hurdle races, started the 7/1 fourth