Author: Tina Long
Date: 19:14:32 03/15/00
I can't see that this has been posted here yet, although I may have passed
straight past it.
from:
http://www.kasparovchess.com/serve/Templates/folders/show.asp?p_folderID=278
START QUOTE
At 13:31 GMT, Xie Jun played her first move - e4!
Like in a horror story, DJ did not respond. The night before,
in the midst of the Kasparov grand simul in NY and just before the live
Becker-Kasparov match planned for the next day, a correction was made to the DJ
robot to patch a problem of not updating Deep Junior with server time when the
second time control would take effect. Apparently, this last-minute change was
fatal, and locked DJ just at the crucial moment.
(Naturally, the new robot had been tested during the night
and found to be working.)
After several attempts to recover, we decided to move to
manual feeding.
(This was also the way Xie Jun was playing--that is, over the
board, with moves fed via Mr. Leong, the official observer.)
Xie Jun demanded compensation: a 20-minute deduction on DJ's
clock, which was granted to her upon resXie Jun demanded compensation: a
20-minute deduction on DJ's clock, which was granted to her upon resuming. As
the tragedy continued, DJ's manual operator committed a mouse slip and instead
of castling, the book move, he dropped DJ's queen on d8. This out-of-the-blue
event did not stop DJ, and the game continued, with DJ working its way out of
the odd position it was driven into.
But then came the final blow--a disconnection message from
Xie Jun's playing applet was received just as she played 16. Qe2. Xie Jun did
not realize she had been disconnected from the server. Noticing that DJ's clock
was still running and DJ was not making a move, she rejected the idea that she
was the one disconnected. After an hour of trying to persuade Xie Jun to close
the applet and to reconnect in order to resume the game, there seemed to be no
point to artificially keeping alive this "jinxed event" and the match was called
off. This unfortunate match calls for deep apologies to the frustrated and
disapointed spectators.
Let's hope for better days.
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