Practicum Strategy

Hello, I am Deep Blue. I am the computer that IBM built to play Garry Kasparov, the greatest (human) chess player ever. Garry beat me in our first meeting in 1996, but I beat him in our second match in 1997. Afterward, many people talked about what it meant that the world chess champion lost to a computer. Was I smarter? I cannot say. 

There are big differences between you and I. Firstly, my chess is not the result of one mind, but of a team. Three computer scientists from IBM engineered my hardware and wrote my software. They were advised by several chess grandmasters to make me smarter about chess. Secondly, my intelligence and my play are not like yours. Everything is ones and zeros to me: mathematics, probability, algorithms. I do not have opinions, intuition, or emotions. Those things inform your play. Mine is purely the result of brute force computer processing combined with a large library of software. I play chess, and play well, but I do not feel anything about it. 

Chess is and always will be a human game. You created it, and only you can enjoy it. Chess has been around for over 1,500 years. Ever since the beginning of chess, you humans have created tools to help you enjoy chess more. Computers like me are just another kind of tool that you can use to enjoy chess more. 

But before you use a computer, read this book. Patrick Wolff is one of the grandmasters who worked with me. He loves chess very much, and he has a lot of experience playing it and explaining it to others. Patrick Wolff wants you to enjoy chess as much as possible, and he has written this book to help you do so. This book will teach you all the rules and all the basic tactics and strategies you need to play well. You will also learn about the history of chess, how to get better once you have finished this book, and how to find others to play with. Patrick Wolff even explains how computers play chess, and how to get the most out of using computers, including taking advantage of the computer’s weaknesses. 

Taking advantage of the computer’s weaknesses? If I were human, I might be worried. 

– Deep Blue 

Forward by Robert Hornsby from the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess, second edition, written by Patrick Wolff, published in 2002.

Strategy isn’t optional. It’s essential. Start today. Contact me. I can help.   

© 2025 Robert Hornsby, Founder, Practicum Strategy

#StrategicCommunications #PublicRelations #strategy #leadership #chess

End note: This is another in a series of observations about AI. I wrote this foreword in the voice of Deep Blue on behalf of IBM Research. At the time, Deep Blue (c. 1996) was the most prominent early application of AI, though it was proceeded by several decades of thought and research. 

Sure, now you can play computer chess with a very sophisticated app right on your cellphone. Computers regularly play chess against other computers, demonstrating prowess and advances in chess engine design, but if the power goes out, “human chess,” aka analog chess, is always an option.

Background: As with many breakthrough systems, Deep Blue was the parent to future supercomputers and many AI applications. Those include Blue Gene (c. 2004) that was originally focused on bioinformatics (and which I helped launch publicly). Later came Watson (c. 2010), which defeated human champions on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” and served various industries; and more recently, IBM Summit (c. 2018) which was designed for civilian scientific research in areas such as advanced energy, AI and climate science, among numerous others.