Jerry Brody on the atmosphere of last year's event:
"It was exciting. It was nerve-wracking when we lost a few games, but no machine is going to be able to beat him [Kasparov] every time. There's always that element that you can't look at, but even the best chess players lose games and even the best chess-playing computer can lose a game."

In his role of support engineer for IBM, Jerry Brody never thought he'd receive the type of media exposure that he's experienced as part of the Deep Blue development team. But then again, Deep Blue isn't your average computer. "As an engineer, most of the stuff I work on, only pieces of it get into products," says Brody. "Nothing was ever a product, so it's very exciting. Never thought I'd be famous."

But Brody doesn't seem to mind the spotlight. "It's wonderful, it's absolutely wonderful. I never expected this kind of press and everything else that's going on."

Brody joins IBM
Jerry joined IBM Research in 1978. During his 19 years at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, he has had the opportunity to work on a variety of ground breaking projects, including the Research Parallel Processor Prototype (RP3); YSE hardware, a logic simulation machine; and 801 machine hardware replication, IBM's first RISC processor. He has also worked on VS-4 hardware, a vector scan system that etched patterns directly onto silicone wafers for sub-micron integrated circiuts in 1978.

A member of the Deep Blue team
Brody was recruited into the Deep Blue project in 1990. "Actually, I was between projects, and they were bringing Murray Campbell and Feng-hsiung Hsu [to IBM]. Hsu had worked on this machine, the Deep Thought machine, and they said, 'How would you like to work on this project?' And I said, 'Why not? Sounds great.' And we've been together ever since. It's a good team. We work well together."

Among other duties on the Deep Blue development team, Brody is responsible for microchannel card de-bugging and system design. But for all of the product testing that Deep Blue undergoes in the lab, Brody feels that the ultimate inspection is the match with Kasparov. "That's what [the match] really is, he says. "It's a good test, a good scientific test."

Brody on Kasparov
Brody believes that there's only one person who could possibly perform such a thorough examination: Garry Kasparov. "He's the best. He's the best chess player anyhow, and I guess chess is a very good tool to useÉ it requires a lot of number crunching." One thing is certain: the development team hopes Deep Blue will pass the test with flying colors.