Garry Kasparov
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IBM celebrates the 15th anniversary of Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov (video)
It's been 15 years since IBM's Deep Blue recorded its famous May 11th 1997 victory over world champion chess player Garry Kasparov -- a landmark in artificial intelligence. Designed by Big Blue as a way of understanding high-power parallel processing, the "brute force" system could examine 200 million chess positions every second, beating the grandmaster 3.5-2.5 after losing 4-2 the previous year. It went on to help develop drug treatments, analyze risk and aid data miners before being replaced with Blue Gene and, more recently, Watson -- which recorded a famous series of victories on Jeopardy! in 2011. If you'd like to know more, we've got a video with one of the computer's fathers: Dr. Murray Campbell and a comparison on how the three supercomputers stack up after the break. As for Garry Kasparov? The loss didn't ruin his career, he went on to win every single Chess trophy conceived, retired, wrote some books and went into politics. As you do.
Politics and the flying penis
Garry Kasparov (former World Chess Champion, now writer and political activist) got himself buzzed by a flying penis during a political speech. Only it didn't happen in the virtual world of Second Life, where such an event has happened before. This one took place at Amber Plaza in the vicinity of Novoslobodskaya metro station in Moscow. The phallus was an artificial one, thankfully. Which all just goes to show that people are no more or less weird out in the physical world than they are in Second Life or any virtual world. Our prediction? You'll see more and more of this sort of thing. Flying penises are about people, not about places. You can click on the image for more visuals. NSFW and all that. [Thanks Carl Metropolitan]
