Deep blue by IBM, and Alpha Go by Google, obviously important, look at the interest, 600 million members is a lot...again, this is not exactly a sport, competition, but not athletic

More interest, more money, generally speaking, Go also has a ton of moves, the board is larger than chess, which has more different types of pieces, 8 x 8, 64 squares in chess, 6 different types of players, pawns, a queen, a king, bishop, knight, rook, some are several, of course two players, but six types of pieces, Go has one, a stone, black always goes 1st, in chess white does, but in Go, the board size can vary, although at the top levels it is usually or almost always 19 x 19, making 361 intersection points, where the stones are played, important for computer science and math, b/c if u could mathematically map all those combinations, u could build even better devices, IBM's thoughts when they challenged Garry Kasparov, and Google's team when they called the South Korean man, Lee Sedol to play him, convincing them that these would be important to science, esp. computer science, Google just added AI feature to its home page, a very big part of everyday life, corporate and government research, hot topic right now more than ever...

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) governs chess globally, with around 201 member federations (countries/nations) as of late 2023/2025, but the number of individual players is much higher, estimated at over 600 million adults playing regularly, with millions actively FIDE-rated or on platforms like Chess.com. While FIDE has 201 national members, it's hard to get an exact total player count, but platforms and national bodies show massive participation