The same year Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, computers also took the board game Othello (Reversi) decisively away from humans. Over August 4-7, 1997, at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, Michael Buro’s program Logistello played a six-game match against reigning Othello world champion Takeshi Murakami and won every game, a perfect 6-0.
Buro documented the result in “The Othello Match of the Year: Takeshi Murakami vs. Logistello,” published in the ICGA Journal in 1997. The margin was not a fluke of one good day: Logistello had been the strongest Othello program for years, and the sweep made clear that the best program now played the game at a level no human could match.
Logistello’s strength came less from raw search than from how it learned to evaluate positions. Buro trained the program on large collections of features extracted from games, fitting their weights from data rather than hand-tuning them - an early, effective use of statistical learning to score board positions. Othello has a much smaller state space than chess or Go, which made it one of the first major board games where humans were comprehensively overtaken, a decade before checkers was fully solved.