"Rage Against the (Chess) Machine"

Wired News (11/10/03); Kahney, Leander

Chess champion Garry Kasparov is set to do battle with the world's preeminent chess program this month in New York in what has become an annual test of man versus machine. The Fritz chess program has been outfitted this time with a 3D interface so that Kasparov, equipped with 3D glasses, will view a 3D version of the board and chess pieces on a monitor and give voice commands to move pieces and start and stop the clock. Despite the gimmick, chess writer Mig Greengard says the four-game tournament is another serious test of human skill against sheer computational power. Greengard said the Fritz program, a version of which is available for PCs, is the standard in computer chess and used by the top chess players worldwide. The version Kasparov will face off against is running on a server with four Xeon processors capable of processing approximately 3 million moves per second. Fritz drew against Kasparov earlier this year, and against chess champion Vladimir Kramnik in the "Brains of Bahrain" match of 2002. Despite the continuing software and hardware improvements made to chess-playing machines, Greengard cites evidence that human players are beginning to adapt and develop better strategies for playing against computers. ChessBase's Jeff Sonas analyzed chess matches between computer and human players and found the trend of humans losing to computers reversing. In Kasparov's match, his concentration may be hampered by the 3D interface, but on the other hand, the relatively short four-game tournament should not tax his stamina too much.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61097,00.html

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