Resumen
People take pride in the knowledge that they are so far superior to computers, specific areas of the brain have been found to handle such specific creative activities as poetry, music composition, humor, and more. For over 1,400 years, chess has challenged the mental abilities of countless generations of humans. Considered the royal game, chess remains unmatched for depth and beauty. Chess also involves a set of very simple rules, all within a universe of 64 squares. Playing chess represents the sternest test of mental faculties; most apparent are concentration, rational thinking, calculation, pattern recognition, recall, planning, logic, and visualization. Then there is the hidden faculty of intuition. In a sensational upset last May, Garry Kasparov, the world's highest-rated human chess player was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue running on an RS/6000 SP system by the score 31/2 to 2 1/2. Deep Blue, which can calculate 200 million positions a second, proved that through brute calculating ability, a computer can match a human's mental faculties and best him.