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