How Computers Made Humans Better at Chess

The World Chess Championship is nearing its close, with the final tie-breaking match between Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Russia's Sergey Karjakin set for Monday. The match, a series of 12 games that began on November 11th, has attracted celebrities, tech leaders, and high-profile media coverage. In part, that's thanks to its New York location, where chess has enjoyed a decade-long surge in popularity. The continuing popularity of chess might have been hard to predict in 1997, after IBM's Deep Blue defeated human World Champion Gary Kasparov (also in New York). Before the match, commentators thought a loss by Kasparov would diminish chess as a pursuit.