This book was an entertaining read but my one criticism was that it is a little too hardware focused. Hsu spent a lot of time talking about the custom VLSI design he did that sped up the processing. However he gave only cursory treatment to the software design: the opening books, the AI, deep blue's ability to "learn" from other games played with grandmasters, and how the programmers adjusted the "weighting" of different components (such as an open rook file) to improve deep blue's positional capabilities. I was hoping to get a little more insight into how chess programs work and what made deep blue unique and special besides its custom circuits and hardware. It is a bit quaint reading about his hand drawn layout on 3 micron cmos and his hand soldered circuit boards. I remember those days and it is a fun reminder. However it makes the book dated because naturally computer processing has sped up so fast that you can essentially run deep blue today on a generic PC, and it is the software design, not the custom hardware enables a computer to play at the grandmaster level