Chess Match Pits Man against Machine
By: Sandy Berger Source: AARP.org Date Posted: 2002-10-28 09:39:19
World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik took on super-computer “Deep Fritz” in a recent chess match. It came down to the last game in the eight-game series which produced a draw in just 21 moves. Each opponent won two games and the other four games all ended draws.
As you might expect from the name, Fritz was developed in Germany. Fritz can evaluate 3.5 million moves a second and is backed by excellent programming and an outstanding development team from the German company ChessBase.
When the 1997 chess match between IBM’s Deep Blue and world champion Gary Kasparov ended in a victory for the computer, some said that humans had been outdone. Deep Blue was based almost solely on computing power with 256 parallel processors capable of analyzing 200 million moves each second. Fritz has only eight processors and is much slower, but has been programmed with algorithms that make it a smarter chess player. Deep Fritz has defeated Deep Blue, making it the machine chess champion.
If Kramnik could have beaten Fritz he would have walked away with a cool $1 million. The draw gives $700,000 to Kramnik, who proved that human logic and ingenuity has not yet been surpassed by machines.
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