Over August 4-7, 1997, at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, Michael Buro’s program Logistello played Othello (Reversi) world champion Takeshi Murakami in a six-game match and won every single game, a perfect 6-0. Buro reported the result in “The Othello Match of the Year: Takeshi Murakami vs. Logistello” in the ICGA Journal.
The clean sweep, in the same year Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, signaled that computers had decisively overtaken the best humans at Othello. Logistello’s strength came largely from evaluation features whose weights were learned from data rather than tuned by hand.