Good Old Human Cunning : Kasparov exploits Deep Blue’s greed to tie at 1-1

With the score tied at one apiece, chess champion Garry Kasparov faces super-computer Deep Blue again today at high noon in Philadelphia. We are rooting for the human being.

Nobody knows the age or origin of the game of chess. We do know that two players move pieces, called men, on a board divided into 64 squares. The object of the game is to trap the opponent’s principal man, the king. And the best man in chess is, paradoxically, the queen, who can move in any direction.

Normally, at the championship level, chess is a game of photographic memory of past contests, brilliant variations and steely nerve. When human meets computer, especially one like IBM’s Deep Blue, whose memory banks are filled with battle-tested options, the match becomes a classic contest of the brain versus a thoughtless but incredibly calculating machine. First-prize money of $400,000 is at stake in the six-game match.

A game is played in three stages: the opening, the middle game and the end game. Memory is the key. Most openings have been tried before, and each player is expected to recognize an opening and devise a countermove.

For the second game of the series, Kasparov chose the Catalan Opening. Deep Blue computed a response, considering perhaps 12 options drawn from the 50 billion chess positions installed in its memory.

A player at Kasparov’s level normally would select a move from three or four options. But the edge is that the human’s options include those drawn from the imagination, not mere calculation.

In the middle game, the Russian grandmaster embraced a strategy he hoped would give him an edge. First, knowing the computer’s insatiable materialism, Kasparov threw a gambit. He sacrificed a pawn, which Deep Blue gladly swallowed. That was all Kasparov needed. He sacrificed another pawn and correctly read a pattern that the computer cannot see. The rest is history.

With four more games to play, Kasparov now stands a good chance to beat the machine. Surprise and imagination are pitted against a pinnacle of artificial intelligence. High noon at Philadelphia: Slap leather! Man vs. machine: Grandmaster Garry Kasparov plots.