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
Computer chess an exhibition match. Deep Thought, however, was still considerably below World Championship Level, as the then reigning world champion Garry Kasparov demonstrated in two strong wins in 1989. It was not until a 1996 match with IBM's Deep Blue that Kasparov lost his first game to a computer at tournament time controls in Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1. This game was, in fact, the first time a reigning world champion had lost to a computer using regular time controls. However, Kasparov regrouped to win three and draw two of the remaining five games of the match, for a