The main point the post is trying to make is accurate, modern chess engines are stronger mostly due to improved eval, search, etc and not hardware; but the idea that Kasparov would lose to one on 90s hardware is not as clearly true as one might think. Modern engine eval functions and search algos make very different depth tradeoffs and when given not enough compute they have glaring weaknesses that Kasparov and his team would likely have exploited.
Also 3000 engine elo is not really a good direct comparison, engine elos are kinda meaningless when comparing human to engines, they are meant to compare engines to engines.
A lot of the knowledge tricks that modern engines do require depth or other things that didn't work on older hardware, deep blue was engineered to brute force a lot of things because brute force in the 90s worked better. Historically all sorts of things were tried for chess engines abandoned and tried again. Chess engine dev (and AI in general) is very cyclical; old ideas get returned to and retried as the hardware changes and evolves. Devs from past eras were smarter and more knowledgeable than we give them credit for. Heck, some of the very first engines for checkers and chess were neural nets (of a sort).
It was trivial for me an expert-ish player (1950 USCF 2300+ bullet) to find a line to beat it. https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2026/algorithmic-improv...
Also 3000 engine elo is not really a good direct comparison, engine elos are kinda meaningless when comparing human to engines, they are meant to compare engines to engines.
A lot of the knowledge tricks that modern engines do require depth or other things that didn't work on older hardware, deep blue was engineered to brute force a lot of things because brute force in the 90s worked better. Historically all sorts of things were tried for chess engines abandoned and tried again. Chess engine dev (and AI in general) is very cyclical; old ideas get returned to and retried as the hardware changes and evolves. Devs from past eras were smarter and more knowledgeable than we give them credit for. Heck, some of the very first engines for checkers and chess were neural nets (of a sort).