Fifteen months on from their first encounter, Garry Kasparov and his AI (artificial intelligence) chess opponent, IBM Corp’s Deep Blue, now able to explore an average of 200 million possible moves per second, are at one game each in their $1.1m rematch. On Saturday Kasparov, playing white, beat Deep Blue by a daring mid- game sacrifice (28th move) which ended up giving him a positional advantage he was able to close the game from. IBM programmers resigned on the 45th move after three hours and forty five minutes of play. The 34-year old, world chess champion for 12 years now, told Reuter he had found the first game of the pair’s rematch very complicated and tense. But in the second match, out of six, it was Kasparov turn to resign at the 45th move, in a similar time frame, seeing that Deep Blue was positioned for a winning end-game. Observers felt the computer, playing white, had the game sewn up from the 37th move. A chess grandmaster who is helping the IBM team told Associated Press: This was a game any human grandmaster would have been proud to play. This was not computer chess. This was real chess. The third game takes place Tuesday, game four on Wednesday, game five on Saturday and the last one (if it gets that far) on Sunday. It’s worth bearing in mind that in 1996 Kasparov lost the first game, won the second, fifth and sixth, and drew Deep Blue in the third and fourth games of the match. Deep Blue is based on an IBM RS/6000 parallel processor with customized chips for playing chess; we have no comment from it on how it plans to spend the $700,000 it stands to win if it beats its human rival this time around.
