World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik faced the powerful Chess program Deep Fritz today in the first of six match games, holding his silicon opponent to a draw Saturday. GM Kramnik played quite solid in the opening, never allowing the game to significantly open up and keeping the board well under control. Kramnik opted for smoothly trading down into a more manageable endgame, even though this phase of the game can prove to be quite daunting for the human player with the computers calculating depth becoming greatly increased due to the reduced number of pieces in play. Super_GM, an observer on the PlayChess.com server, remarked about the nature of the board following the initial moves, “This is the type of position to aim for versus a computer…not too much tactics, but not too much anti-computer strategy either.”
In this rematch of their 2002 encounter, which Kramnik drew 4:4 after initially leading by a score of 3:1, Deep Fritz operates on a Dual Intel Core 2 Duo 5160 system which allows it to calculate about 8mil positions per second, an intimidating increase in strength over its predecessors maximum of approximately 2.7mil per second. This level of competition presents a seemingly insormountable task for the human player, who must maintain steady concentration at all times and avoid even the slightest mistake, since the opponent across the table will not return the favor. While Vladimir stands to receive $1mil Euros with a victory, on top of his $500k appearance fee, the focus is most assuredly not on the monetary prize. From Kramnik:
“The machine is the clear favorite, but don’t discount me just yet. I know some top players would be very nervous about playing the computer – they might even avoid this kind of match. That’s understandable since a cut-and-dried defeat can affect your future game. Of course, this computing monster keeps getting better year by year, month by month, day by day: My opponent will be incredibly strong. But I think I can still beat it. Whenever I can fight, I’m extremely motivated. After all, I might be the last human being to be able to defeat this machine. My team and I will be expending all our efforts to cut this so-called artificial intelligence down to size.â€
While some observers felt that Kramnik could have pushed a slight advantage in the middle portion of the game, it seems that a draw will give the flesh and blood Champion an underlying confidence going into Game 2, which is slated for Monday the 27th. Chess and Poker Dot Com will post updated reports as we continue our coverage at that time. Good luck to both participants.
