Word: kasparov
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Over entrees a smug Tan hits Kasparov with the news of Deeper Blue's smashing victory over the program that made him sweat last February, and suddenly he focuses, laserlike, on his favorite subject. Before last year's match, he admits, the chess world felt "a computer would have very little chance of beating a top grand master." That myth faded quickly. Halfway through Game 1, faced with daunting circumstances--"an open position, my king is exposed, many weaknesses"--Kasparov undertook a blitzkrieg aimed at Deep Blue's king, the sort of hell-bent gambit that has devastated every pretender...
Deep Blue didn't flinch. His gambit, Kasparov admits, was "a complete disaster, because the computer simply doesn't care. If the threats are not real, it sees that. So the machine simply took all the pawns and defended its king." And for an industry that IBM had built in the first place, scored the first win over a world champion. "Then I realized," he says, "that this will be tough...
...person, Kasparov is something of a surprise. Handsome and burly, he has a temper and psychology more befitting a garrulous European uncle than a genius geek who spends his life hunched over a chessboard. During appetizers he enthralls the table with discourses on a diverse array of topics, including hot chocolate (the world's best is found at Cafe Angelica on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris), Kremlin politics ("Russia has no choice other than Lebed!") and his infant son Vadim--"I want to stay on top long enough for him to recognize his father as a champion...
...Kasparov, and in the ensuing games he mercilessly exposed his opponent's weaknesses. Deep Blue is a data-grinding engine of staggering proportions: a 1.5-ton supercomputer able to sort 40 billion combinations in an average three-minute move, shining its searchlight far into a game's future to find a winning strategy. When your opponent is Kasparov, though, it's (thus far) impossible for even a 1.5-ton supercomputer to search far enough to be sure it chooses wisely. "Deep Blue sees everything in the searchlight very well," says research scientist Murray Campbell. "But after that, in the black...
...bishop get trapped on the edge of the board, with little power and zero mobility. The awful tragedy of the edge-locked bishop wasn't fully salted into its code base at the time, so the poor computer was oblivious to the depth of its positional peril, and Kasparov won the game handily. But things won't go so easily for mankind this time around. Says a pleased Benjamin: "Deeper Blue understands more about bishops--when they're good, when they're bad, how to use them better. It understands rooks better. It understands knights better...