Could better software have spared Deep Blue its special-purpose hardware? Nicholas Carlini's November 1 experiment ports modern chess ideas onto a real 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 64 MB of RAM—and offers a browser board to play it.

He used language models to implement engine changes and the tiny boot/networking system. Better move search and a compact learned position evaluator make the old machine surprisingly strong. In his 100-game comparison, its adapted modern engine beat 1996 Crafty running on modern hardware: 78 wins, 17 draws, five losses.

That is not a match against Kasparov. Rating ladders differ, the classical-time estimate is extrapolated, and training and tuning used modern compute. Running efficiently on old hardware does not mean developing it required only old hardware.