Garry Kasparov, world chess champion, sits down in 1989 to play Deep Thought, an IBM research computer built by Feng-Hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell to see how far brute-force calculation could go against a grandmaster. NOVA follows the match through commentary from Robert Byrne and Shelby Lyman, interviews with programmers Thomas Anantharam and Ken Thompson, and computer scientist Herbert Simon weighing in on what the game can and cannot prove about machine thinking. The film reaches back to the eighteenth century for the Mechanical Turk, the fraudulent chess-playing automaton that hid a human operator inside its cabinet, using it to frame two centuries of the same question: can a machine actually think, or just perform. Deep Thought loses to Kasparov, but the episode is explicit that its calculations are pure pattern-matching with no vision of the board and no understanding, the same limitation that would carry forward into Deep Blue's 1997 rematch and later into IBM's Watson. Jonathan Schaeffer's game-playing research rounds out the picture of where the technology was headed next.