Who's the Pawn in This Match?

There may be no better battles between man and machine than those over the chessboard.

So far, the machine has the edge. The great Russian champion Garry Kasparov lost a six-game match in 1997 to IBM's Deep Blue.

But man gets a rematch this year. And chess insiders think that this will be a fairer contest and a truer test of what comes out ahead in a battle of creativity and raw analytic ability -- microprocessors or neurons.

Vladimir Kramnik, the Russian who beat Kasparov in November to claim the world title, sits ready to defend man's honor. First, though, he has to wait to see who he will face, depending on the winner of a computer-only competition that begins Tuesday in Cadaques, Spain.

It's that pre-qualifying competition that's taken on a life of its own. If you think humans can sometimes seem petty and ego-driven, you won't believe the melodrama that's ensued after the reigning world computer champ, the Shredder, wasn't given an automatic invitation to face Kramnik.

To comprehend the current controversy, a little background is in order.

Chess purists cringe at short matches such as the six-game contest Kasparov dropped to Big Blue's finest. The action in Spain will not leave nearly as much room for chance: Deep Fritz, a German entry, and Deep Junior, from Israel, will grapple with each other for days, playing 24 games.

"These programs keep developing," said Frederic Friedel of ChessBase, the Hamburg company that distributes both programs. "They become stronger and stronger."

The winner moves on to the eight-game match this October in Bahrain against Kramnik -- who will collect a cool $1 million if he wins and $600,000 if he loses. The action will adjourn each day after six hours, with or without a result -- so Kramnik can have time to recuperate, something Kasparov did not have in his historic match with Deep Blue.

"The last time, it was horribly biased in favor of the computer program," said Raymond Keene, an organizer of the contest who is not only a world grand master, but also the author of 100 chess books and a chess column for The Times of London.

"Kasparov didn't see any games by Deep Blue beforehand," Keene said. "There were no adjournments, so he got tired. The computer doesn't get tired. So that's not fair."

Someone who is tired cannot think as clearly and also cannot exercise the creativity and intuition -- traits that show humans do more than just calculate.

"Chess is not mathematics," Kasparov told Wired magazine in February 1995. "Chess is fantasy. It's our human logic, not a game with a concrete result. Mathematically, it cannot be expired. The number of potential chess moves exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. It's a number beyond any possible calculation. Theoretically, it's unsolvable."

But before it comes down to man versus machine, there is the small matter of deciding which computer program will be granted the honor of trying to continue Deep Blue's winning streak now that IBM has dismantled (perhaps) the world's greatest chess-playing intelligence.

This is the controversial part: Keene invited the top four challengers in the world to Spain so they could slug it out, or whatever computer programs do, to see who would take on Kramnik.

The Original Story from: wired