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
The Deep Blue Good-by back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness. This was in a paperback originally published in 1965 when the general public was still not conversant with the concept of environmentalism. "The Deep Blue Good-by" introduces readers to McGee, his place of residence, the "Busted Flush" (a houseboat he won in a poker game), and its mooring place, slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In the early chapters we learn that McGee is