PART 1 • Humans meet their match
project) in a six game match played in Philadelphia. The event garnered
a huge amount of interest, even among the non-chessplaying public. At
the time the match was played, I was employed as a computer analyst for
a large corporation and, following each game, co-workers from all over
the facility would drop by the lab to discuss the latest results with me;
most of these folks were either non-players or interested casual players.
And, despite the fact that many of these people were programmers,
technicians, or other computer professionals, nearly every one of them
expressed the hope that Garry Kasparov would emerge victorious.
Fans rooting for Garry weren't disappointed. The champion scored a 4-2
victory (but a computer win in the last game would have made the match
a tie).
The following year brought the ultimate challenge for the human world
champion. A solid year of tinkering and analysis brought forth a Deep
Blue that was even stronger than the version Kasparov had fought the
previous year. In May, 1997 Garry Kasparov faced Deep Blue in New
York City, in a six game match against the imposing behemoth housed
in a pair of black metal cabinets.
And lost.
Much ink has been spilled in the print medium (and many electrons
sacrificed online) in analysis of this match; I own two or three books
written about the event and have perused innumerable web sites devoted
to the subject. The following, in “Cliff Notes” terms, is basically what
happened.
Garry won the first game, but lost the second – and, worse yet, had
resigned in a drawing position. In an incident which demonstrates the
power of the Internet (which at that time was just beginning to become
a tool for the general public rather than the domain of academics), an
amateur player posted analysis within hours of the game's end in which
he successfully demonstrated that Kasparov could have drawn Game
Two.
There has been a world of controversy surrounding the match which
began the day after Game Two, including arguments which persist to this
day. Kasparov couldn't believe what he'd done, and much of the fight
seemed to go out of him at that point. Kasparov (as well as his supporters)
began to accuse IBM of cheating by using human grandmaster analysis
during games; the champion publicly refused to believe that he'd
been bested by a machine “fair and square” (despite the fact that he'd
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