Chess databases contain the results of literally hundreds of thousands of games and like any other database can be mined for predictive insight. IBM’s programmers studied things like how often each sequence of opening moves had been played and how strong the players were who played them, as well as how often each series of moves resulted in wins, losses, and draws for their respective sides.20 The computer’s heuristics for analyzing these statistics could potentially put it on a level playing field with human intuition and experience, if not well ahead of it. “Kasparov isn’t playing a
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