Chess Computer Holds Its Own in Title Match

The kid had never been in a title bout.

In fact, ChessBrain was just 3 years old and had never gone one-on-one with a human being, let alone one of Denmark’s top players, ranked 53rd in the world.

But there they were on a snowy night in Copenhagen, eager to engage in battle.

The Jan. 30 chess match pitted Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen against the more than 2,000 computers of a loosely knit, global web called ChessBrain -- the all-consuming pastime of Thousand Oaks software engineer Carlos Justiniano.

The dust-up, which ended in a draw, established a Guinness record for “the world’s largest networked chess computer.”

For Justiniano, 38, it was the stuff of legend: “This is the direction science fiction travels,” he said. “In the entire history of the planet, I’m not sure a collection of machines like this has collaborated to play a single game -- any kind of game -- against a human.”

Over thousands of hours, Justiniano, a prodigy who rose out of the south Bronx in New York, had devoted himself to ChessBrain, tweaking computer programs and e-mailing far-flung collaborators.

As his wife and young daughter slept, he labored in the glow of nine computer screens, envisioning the day ChessBrain would hold its own in high-level competition.

“It’s been an incredible journey just to get to this point,” said Justiniano, who quit his job with a Torrance software company in December to prepare for the Denmark match.

“To lose without making a blunder was the best we had hoped for,” he said.

ChessBrain is not a single machine. It’s a “distributed-computing” system that depends totally on the kindness of strangers.

The concept is simple: Thousands of ordinary desktop computers working together can do the same kind of hugely complex tasks as supercomputers. And they can do them silently, while their owners e-mail jokes to their pals or scan the Internet.

Around the world, enthusiasts have downloaded a program from www.chessbrain.net that allows the network to use a tiny fraction of their computers’ excess processing power. That power enables ChessBrain to digest millions of moves from online chess games it has witnessed and games it has played against other chess engines.

Many people who volunteer their machines to the cause aren’t particularly interested in chess, Justiniano said. But they’re crazy about distributed computing and sign on for efforts to design new AIDS drugs, search for the largest prime number and scan the universe for other signs of life.

In Copenhagen, Justiniano and his colleagues were frantically scanning the city for cables, cords and adapters. Their luggage, containing much of their equipment, had been lost.

“In the Scandinavian night, I was still wearing shorts,” said Cedric Griss, founder of the Distributed Computing Foundation, a Utah-based group that raised funds for the match. “The Danish looked at us as if we were mad, and, in a way, I suppose we were.”

The gear was finally delivered and running. As a blizzard swirled outside, about 50 spectators sat expectantly in a Copenhagen science center. A few seconds after grandmaster Nielsen made his first move, they watched as the computer system collapsed.

“The network was struggling with the fact that thousands of computers were bombarding it all at once,” Justiniano said. “Its own peers were swamping it.”

In a separate room, Justiniano went into overdrive, along with Colin Frayn, a 25-year-old British astrophysicist who developed ChessBrain’s software. The two had corresponded by e-mail for two years, but, until the night before the match, they had never spoken.

Forty-five minutes later, ChessBrain made its first move. It played without a hitch for nearly four hours, responding to each of Nielsen’s moves after conferring with 2,070 computers in 56 countries from Taiwan to Togo.

Nielsen was impressed. “It had good and bad moments, but so do grandmasters,” he said, noting that ChessBrain handily eluded various traps he’d set.

Sitting opposite Nielsen, Peter Wilson made ChessBrain’s moves after the network’s next move popped up on his computer screen. A former chairman of the World Chess Federation’s computer chess committee, Wilson said ChessBrain was different from most of the computers he’d seen in action.

“You can just look at their moves and know there’s a computer behind them,” said Wilson, who flew to the match from his home on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. “Computer chess can be very cautious. It over-protects everything. Its moves can be quite ugly; they objectively may be the best, but they’re not appealing to a player at the grandmaster level.”

Despite some flaws, ChessBrain “played certain surprises,” Wilson said. “They were rather more the type of plays that I think humans would make.”

After 34 moves, Nielsen and ChessBrain agreed that neither could win and declared a draw -- the anticlimactic ending to about half of all top-level matches.

For Justiniano, who is back in Thousand Oaks looking for a job, a draw was the sweetest of victories.

“It’s one thing to be looked at as a crackpot and another to come back and say: ‘Well, it’s done,’ ” he said.

Besides, in chess as in baseball, there’s always next year. A rematch is planned for 2005.