Manual de Chess King 2015 | Page 36

PART 1 • Humans meet their match previously lost the first game of the 1996 match to an earlier version of the computer). Supporters of the IBM team accused Kasparov mere blustering to mask the psychological shock he'd suffered by resigning in a drawn position. By the end of Game Five, the score was tied at 2.5 games each. The final game was played on a Sunday, May 11th. I remember the game well, as it was a day off from work for me, and I was providing live opening book, database (from what was at the time one of the world's largest privately-owned chess databases), and computer analysis for online viewers of the match. The world champion, playing the Black pieces, committed a horrible blunder on his seventh move (and a surprising one, since the move was a well-known stinker, even at the amateur level) and he was never able to recover from his mistake; he resigned after White's nineteenth move. The following day I wrote an essay on what I saw as the future impact of Kasparov's defeat, which was published a week after the event on a ChessBase-sponsored web site. I'm reprinting it verbatim here (being as I'm the copyright holder) because it addresses a few points about chess and computers which we'll return to a bit later on in this book. 36 chessking.com