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
Deep Blue versus Kasparov, 1997, Game 6 first time that a computer had defeated a World Champion in a match of several games. This, as well as the fact that Kasparov had lasted only 19 moves in a game lasting barely more than an hour, attracted much media attention. White: Deep Blue Black: Garry Kasparov Opening: Caro–Kann Defense, Steinitz Variation ("ECO" B17) 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 dxe4 4. Nxe4 Nd7 5. Ng5 (see diagram) 5... Ngf6 6. Bd3 e6 7. N1f3 h6? (see diagram) 8. Nxe6! 8... Qe7 9. 0-0 9... fxe6 10. Bg6+ Kd8 11. Bf4 (see diagram) 11... b5? 12. a4