The contrast with Deep Blue, the chess-playing machine, is telling.

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This notion was revived in the 1950s, when the building of a genuine chess-playing machine was seen by artificial-intelligence researchers as a stepping-stone towards a general theory of machine intelligence.

ECONOMIST: Computers and chess

If the machine works as researchers think it will, chess masters ought to look out -- Blue Gene would be 1, 000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

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Donmar Warehouse artistic director Josie Rourke will direct The Machine, a new play about chess player Garry Kasparov's battle with the supercomputer Deep Blue, written by Matt Charman.

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Chess was never likely to be a good yardstick for measuring machine intelligence as its strictly formal nature, devoid of fuzziness and chance, is exactly the opposite of the kind of task where the human brain excels.

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This machine, known as the Turk because of its exotic costume, could play chess, moving the pieces with a mechanical arm and defeating even the best human players.

ECONOMIST: Computers and chess