If you get a chance, you may want to check out a new book called Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality (ISBN 0262193787 ). It has a lot of good essays on the current state of ArtificialIntelligence, including an interesting article by one of DeepBlue's designers. He discusses Deep Blue's brute force strategy, and contrasts it with how HalNineThousand played chess. For example, HAL seemed to intuit his opponent's strategy, something that Deep Blue is incapable of doing. (Which doesn't mean that HAL 9000 couldn't make mistakes....) -- JamesCollins