Garry Kasparov

WASHINGTON -- No sooner had IBM's Deep Blue whipped chess champion Garry Kasparov than the question came, ''Can machines think?'' Many of the experts answered, ''No.'' They said that Deep's activity wasn't really thinking, it was just the ''brute force'' of calculations made possible by so much computing power (200 million operations per second!). That isn't really thinking, the argument went: A computer is just ''a big dumb adding machine.''Daniel Dennet, director of the Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies, puts the topic in a different light.

MOSCOW -- They spoke of political repression, compliant courts, stifled news media, institutionalized corruption and human rights lapses - all the elements of a society that is not free. The most prominent figures in Russia's political opposition gathered yesterday and Tuesday to deliver a message that they are resigned to having drowned out when the summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations opens in St. Petersburg on Saturday: There is not one Russia, but two. "One is the official Russia, which is like a big Potemkin village," said Andrei Illarionov, President Vladimir V. Putin's former economics adviser, who has offered some of the harshest criticism of the administration.

Garry Kasparov, human genius, is locked in a death struggle (OK, a chess match; same thing) with a computer. The six-game series is tied, with two to play. And should K-- am I wrong here? -- a machine.You know what they always said. They always said that a computer may be able to do three trillion calculations a second, but it could never paint like van Gogh or, even if it had ears, chop either of them off.There's no mystery to a computer, they said. It's just a fancy machine.In fact, within the scientific community, there is something called the James Brown Theorem, which holds that computers may be clever but they have no soul.

New York - Shortly before 5 p.m. yesterday, detectives from the local precinct swept the three-card monte dealers off the corner of 44th Street and Broadway, making chess, as in the world championship, for a moment the most popular contest in midtown.Well, it wasn't like the World Series or the Stanley Cup. Champion Garry Kasparov and challenger Anatoly Karpov don'tyet rank in the league of Ali, Frazier or Colts-Giants, at least not here, not yet. The local enthusiasm wasn't obvious, and the crowds were just the ordinary Times Square mess.

Hilary Swank has Sandra Bullock and Ashley Judd to thank for her Best Actress Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, reports the New York Post -- because the role was refused by both actresses. Producer Albert S. Ruddy's first choice for the part of a tragic female boxer was Bullock, who turned down the part when she was told she could not pick the director. Ruddy next approached Judd, whose salary demands would have busted the budget. After Ruddy finally settled on Swank, Bullock's agent called him and said she would do the picture after all, but "Al just said, `Too late,'" says a source.

MOSCOW -- Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, 31-year-old millionaire president of tiny Kalmykia, has fully embraced capitalism."Kalmykia," he says of the autonomous Russian republic, "will not be a republic but a corporation."Two years ago, Mr. Ilyumzhinov was just another young, up-and-coming Communist with an elite education. Then he started working for a Japanese company and began earning dollars.His conversion was swift and complete. "Let's do business," he remembers resolving, "and talk about ideology later."

Call it the "Nerd Factor." That's the image of chess in the United States: the guy with glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms, six pens in his ink-stained pocket, an off-key laugh that seems rather bizarre at best.And that's the good image, considering the past. Consider Paul Morphy, the greatest American chess player of the 19th century. ended up a babbling madman, suffering from paranoid delusions. Consider Bobby Fischer, the greatest American chess player of the 20th century. After he won the world championship in 1972, he went into hiding in Southern California, avoiding all chess competition, surfacing occasionally only in odd rumors that he was spending his days distributing religious pamphlets in mall parking lots.

IBM has built the first supercomputer that, scientists hope, is powerful enough to simulate the explosion of a nuclear weapon. The $110 million machine is a major step toward an era when computers will provide such benefits as vastly improved weather forecasts and individually designed medicines. The new IBM computer, called ASCI White, weighs 106 tons and occupies an area the size of two basketball courts. It would take the next four biggest computers in the world combined to equal its processing power.

Bobby Fischer has been gone from public view for 20 years -- but among avid local chess players he has hardly been forgotten.For two decades, they have read the former world champion's books; studied the moves of his most famous games; swapped stories about his private life -- and wondered whether he would ever return to international play.Now they are eagerly, if somewhat skeptically, awaiting a $5 million exhibition match between the reclusive Mr. Fischer and Boris Spassky, scheduled to begin today on an island off the coast of what was once Yugoslavia.

LONDON -- They say if you don't like the weather in Great Britain, then just wait 20 minutes, it will change. They say this is a great place to experience summer and winter in a day. They say that without the weather as a conversation starter, strangers in Britain would have absolutely nothing to talk about.Which brings us to the most unusual weather forecaster in the country.His name is Piers Corbyn. He bets the weather.Each month, Corbyn wagers $1,000 on a string of British weather predictions, making him the country's biggest gambler on weather.