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 Michael Adams 5½–½ in a six-game match. While Adams was criticized for not preparing as well as Kasparov and Kramnik had, some commentators saw this as heralding the end of human-computer matches. Kramnik, then still the World Champion, played a six-game match against the computer program Deep Fritz in Bonn, Germany from November 25 to December 5, 2006, losing 4–2 to the machine, with two losses and four draws. He received 500,000 Euros for playing and would have received another 500,000 Euros had he won the match. Deep Fritz version 10 ran on a computer containing two Intel Xeon CPUs