A New Era

"I tried to play through the rest of the game as best I could, but I lost because [Deep Blue] played great. It played like God."
--Garry Kasparov

In 1995, shortly before he was to play IBM's Deep Blue, World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov defeated challenger Viswanathan Anand in eighteen demanding and gripping games. Here for the first time are move-by-move analyses by International Grandmaster Leonid Shamkovich and by Master--and Kasparov second--Michael Khodarkovsky which provide insight into the mind of the world champion as he prepared for the match against Deep Blue.

Garry Kasparov handily won his first match with Deep Blue, but it is clear from Khodarkovsky's description that even in 1996 the massively parallel computer could be a difficult opponent. Then, before the spring 1997 rematch, the IBM team let on that it had improved Deep Blue considerably and that it was spoiling for a fight . . . The analysis of these games in A New Era shows just how much IBM has improved the breed.

Must-reading for anyone who is passionate about the world's most enduring game of strategy and wits, A New Era takes the reader inside the world of professional chess, offering insiders' insights (including those of Kasparov himself) into the politics and psychology of competition at the top levels of play, whether against human or machine.

"A [match] victory by Deep Blue would be a very important and frightening milestone in the history of Mankind."
--Garry Kasparov