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
Human–computer chess matches points. Humans won 148 ½ points. Yona Kosashvili scored highest for the humans at 6 points out of 6 games. Kallisto scored highest for the computers at 4 ½ points. In 1988, Deep Thought shared first place with Tony Miles in the Software Toolworks Championship, ahead of a former world champion Mikhail Tal and several grandmasters, including Samuel Reshevsky, Walter Browne, and Mikhail Gurevich. It also defeated grandmaster Bent Larsen, making it the first computer to beat a grandmaster in a tournament. Its rating for performance in this tournament of 2745 (USCF scale). In 1989, Levy was defeated by the