Deep Blue (Team) Cheated (Score 1)

I created an account just to make this comment. Those who are interested can go back and look at the event itself; those who don't care needn't bother. The long and short of it is, Deep Blue was programmed (during that event) specifically to beat Kasparov. This itself is not so bad-- Grand Masters carefully study past games of future opponents as part of their preparation. But Kasparov was not given access to any of Deep's previous games. This is a significant handicap.

Does this mean the current world's best humans could still beat the best computers? Not necessarily. I am not entering the debate on whether computers or humans are better. As others pointed out, there's plenty of games that humans still excel at. I just wanted to point out that Deep Blue's 'victory' was less a milestone in computing power, and more a footnote in program development.

Feel free to flame. Gotta go play in the Halo 3 Beta.

--Jason E (Seattle)