Ray Kurzweil control over the flow of information. In the book, Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance 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 match. 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 unreliable,
Computer chess able to draw matches against former world champion Garry Kasparov and classical world champion Vladimir Kramnik. In October 2002, Vladimir Kramnik and Deep Fritz competed in the eight-game Brains in Bahrain match, which ended in a draw. Kramnik won games 2 and 3 by "conventional" anti-computer tactics – play conservatively for a long-term advantage the computer is not able to see in its game tree search. Fritz, however, won game 5 after a severe blunder by Kramnik. Game 6 was described by the tournament commentators as "spectacular." Kramnik, in a better position in the early middlegame, tried a piece sacrifice