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
Reversi game has been particularly attractive to programmers. Therefore, the best Othello computer programs have easily defeated the best humans since 1980, when the program "The Moor" beat the reigning world champion. In 1997, Logistello defeated the human champion Takeshi Murakami with a score of 6–0. Analysts have estimated the number of legal positions in Othello is at most 10, and it has a game-tree complexity of approximately 10. Mathematically, Othello still remains unsolved. Experts have not absolutely resolved what the outcome of a game will be where both sides use perfect play. However, analysis of thousands of high quality games