Thanks for the link!

Yes Deep blue used brute force and most chatbots also use that, but there is plenty of other stuff going on.

Conversational agent research is not necessarily related to chatbots, it's Q&A and also IR interestingly. I have seen some very cool systems that definitely are not using brute force AI

Yey for progress!

Just as Deep Blue brute-forced it in chess with speed, the idea behind the Chatbot Game is to brute-force it with a huge number of user-submitted Google-like chat rules.