Author: Bob Basham
Date: 08:15:29 02/28/02
... LONDON, July 31 (Xinhuanet) -- World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik will test his intelligence when he plays against world's most powerful chess computer in Barain in October. The Russian said Tuesday he hoped intuition would help him outwit the supercomputer named Deep Fritz in a series of eight games over eight days in Bahrain. "I believe this match will attract a lot of interest because there are not many fields in which humans can compete against computers," he said. "I'm quite scared to hear the computer can see four million moves a second. I'll be happy to do one a second. "But I'm sure that I have my own trump and my own chances." Details of the challenge, hyped by the Brain Games Network organisers as a "last chance for human intelligence" to assert its superiority over machines, were unveiled at a news conference in west London. Kramnik, 26, entered the packed venue escorted by two minders while Franz Morsch, co-author of Deep Fritz, brought the programme in a sealed attache case which he refused to open for reporters. "We have worked for years on this particular programme," he said, adding, that the computer's capacity to scan four million positions a second "should be enough to overplay even a grand master like Kramnik." The contest, from October 12 to November 1 in Manama, is being billed as a sequel to ex-world champion Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat to the supercomputer Deep Blue in New York. Deep Fritz, whose name derives from a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact the computer is German and 'deep thinking', is an updated and advanced version of Deep Blue. Rules for the 2001 contest have also been amended. Kramnik will be able to see every chess game played by the computer -- an advantage Kasparov was not given. The match will also be adjourned every six hours so Kramnik can re-energize to counter-balance the computer's lack of fatigue. Finally, the technological team will not be permitted to re- programme the computer after every game. Kramnik will win one million U.S. dollars (1.15 million euros) if he beats Deep Fritz in the contest, to be broadcast on the Internet. Even if the computer wins, he will still get 600,000 dollars, leaving Deep Fritz pocketing a mere 400,000 dollars, which its company plans to donate to a European junior chess fund. Kramnik said he would like to get some advice from Kasparov, " but you have to remember that we are still opponents on the chess board." The world champion, who will begin preparing for the game later this week, said most people were already under the impression that computers are better at chess than humans. "I want to prove that is not the case." Enditem ======== copied
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.