World champion
to battle chess supercomputer: A challenge of ‘Brains in Bahrain’
WORLD CHESS champion Vladimir Kramnik
will play the "Deep Fritz 7" chess supercomputer in an eight-game match in Bahrain
in October, organizers Brain Games PLC announced.
Aug 11, 2001, 01:13 PM
JORDAN
(Star) - WORLD CHESS champion Vladimir Kramnik will play the "Deep Fritz 7" chess
supercomputer in an eight-game match in Bahrain in October, organizers Brain Games
PLC announced.
This will be the first man
vs. machine chess showdown since IBM Corp.’s "Deep Blue" RS/6000-based parallel
computer defeated former world chess champion Garry Kasparov 3.5 points to 2.5
points in 1997. The new match has been given the title "Brains in Bahrain." Kramnik,
a Russian, will earn $1 million if he wins, $800,000 for a drawn match, and $600,000
if he loses. Kramnik ended Kasparov's 15-year reign as world champion last year,
and will be playing against a machine capable of analyzing four million moves
per second. Deep Fritz has been built from scratch by an independent group of
computer and chess specialists, led by Dutch programmer Frans Morsch, after IBM
decided not to continue the Deep Blue project. Deep Fritz has previously beaten
Deep Blue, Kasparov and World Chess Federation champion Vishwanathan Anand. The
1997 match offered evidence that machines could be more effective in carrying
out some complex processing tasks than humans, re-igniting a long-standing debate
about machine, or artificial, intelligence. Deep Blue chose moves via an algorithm
that evaluated the "goodness" of chess positions rated by material (the number
and value of the player's remaining pieces), position, King safety and tempo.
The search algorithm was able to choose profitable-looking lines of play to search
"deep," or several moves ahead. Deep Blue also contained a preprogrammed database
of chess information, including more than 2,000 opening moves. Brains in Bahrain
will be played between 14 October and 31 October.
Information provided by "The STAR".
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