"Peter and I had been in the same 1982 incoming class at
Carnegie Mellon. We knew each other, but were not really close. I
bumped into Peter in the Computer Science lounge a few weeks
before the Fredkin Masters Open, and mentioned what I was
doing. Peter was asking a lot of questions, but I had no idea that
he was thinking about getting IBM to hire us.
Years later, Peter described how he got the upper management
in IBM interested in continuing the project inside IBM. It was
around the time of the Superbowl season. Peter happened to be in
the men's room with Abe Peled, the IBM Research Vice President of
Computer Science. They started talking about how expensive the
Superbowl TV commercial spots were. Peter suggested that he
knew a way to gain much greater publicity at far lower cost. He
knew this group of graduate students working on computer chess
at Carnegie Mellon, and he believed that this team would create
the first chess machine to beat the World Champion. Given the
historical significance of the quest, and the latent public interest,
IBM could stand to gain huge advertising value from the endeav-
or. Oh, yes, members of the team were world-class people that IBM
would be interested in hiring anyway. Abe got interested and asked
Peter to look into it."<p>"In the end, the name <i>Deep Blue</i> was chosen, submitted by Peter Brown, that same classmate who was partially responsible for our being hired by IBM. For winning the contest, Peter was treated to a nice dinner with us, and a chance to play Deep Thought. He declined the second part of his award."<p>Feng-hsiung Hsu, <i>Behind Deep Blue</i><p>I've never made the link between that Peter Brown and Rentec... Also he confirms a lot of anecdotes from <i>The Man Who Solved the Market</i> by Gregory Zuckerman.<p>Listen to the audio: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWX8V9KSZM8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWX8V9KSZM8</a>