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
Music for Reliquary House / In 1980 I Was a Blue Square Point Never side "Music for Reliquary House", a composition and set of remixes of audio Lopatin produced for Nate Boyce's audiovisual project "Reliquary House". The primary sounds of the composition are bits of computer-produced human speech reconstructed into new sounds. The second half, "In 1980 I Was A Blue Square" by Rene Hell, is a suite of minimalist contemporary classical music that also includes electronic sounds. For both Daniel Lopatin and Jeff Witscher, Music For Reliquary House and In 1980 I Was A Blue Square are shifts from their early synthesizer-heavy recordings to electroacoustic music. "Pitchfork" journalist Nick Neyland called