detonate.net - Kasparov vs. Computer Showdown!

It has been a long wait for Garry Kasparov - five years and eight months, to be exact. But now the world's number one chess player has the chance to get his own back after he stunned the world of chess by losing to a computer in 1997.

In a six-game contest that began on Sunday night in New York, Mr Kasparov, officially the highest rated player in the 1,500-year history of the game, takes on Deep Junior, an Israeli-designed program and world computer chess champion.

With at least a day's rest between games, each of which may last up to seven hours, it will be another six days at the earliest before a winner emerges. Many believe the result will hang on the last game, which is scheduled for February 7.

The contest is billed as the ultimate showdown between man and machine. "[The match] is very important for the game of chess and the human race as a whole," Mr Kasparov said. He added that he hoped "to prove human players are not hopeless".

More inside and stuff...

Chess-playing computer programs have made huge improvements in recent years and most experts agree they are on the verge of consistently outplaying the best humans. Last October, Vladimir Kramnik, the Russian world champion, drew a match with a computer that most experts thought he would win convincingly.

That result places even greater pressure on Mr Kasparov. A win is worth $800,000 but for him it is not about money. His 1997 loss to Deep Blue, a 1.4 tonne computer designed by International Business Machines, was the first time a reigning world champion lost a match played over traditional time limits to a computer. It had a profound impact on Mr Kasparov - and on his public image.

Until that match, he was known first and foremost as the most successful chess player the world had produced. Aged 12, he became Soviet champion; at 14, he won the title of grandmaster and at 22, he beat Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest world champion. Deep Blue cast a dark shadow over his career. "All the great achievements of Kasparov were obliterated in the minds of the general public when he lost to Deep Blue," says John Nunn, a top British player and an expert on chess computer programs.

Mr Kasparov has sworn revenge ever since. Yet he is under no illusions about the task facing him. To start, he will once again have to battle against an opponent that never suffers emotional or physical tiredness, factors that could affect him as the match progresses. As Mr Kasparov said last week: "Computers do not feel the pressure, they don't get tired or hungry."

Another factor likely to make things harder for Mr Kasparov is that his preparation has been interrupted by legal problems.

The 39-year-old from Azerbaijan was scheduled to begin the match with two warm-up games in Jerusalem but they were cancelled at the last minute after his lawyers advised him not to go. The First International Bank of Israel is suing Mr Kasparov for damages after Kasparov Chess Online, his troubled company, failed to repay a $1.5m loan.

The unresolved dispute has taken almost two weeks out of the chess player's training schedule. "I don't know whether the First International Bank of Israel planned it that way but it became a mighty ally of the Junior Team," Mr Kasparov said recently.

Most important, though, is the fact that Deep Junior plays chess extremely well, even by the standards of Kasparov - known by fellow grandmasters as "the monster from Baku" for his aggressive style and intimidating glare over the chessboard. Although the program only analyses between 2m-3m positions a second compared with Deep Blue's 200m-300m, most agree it is far superior at chess.

"We are moving into a new era where chess programs understand more abstract concepts [than the older machines]," said Shay Bushinsky, a co-designer of Deep Junior. That poses all kinds of problems for even the best human chess players such as Mr Kasparov.

Until a few years ago, grandmasters used to beat computer programs relatively easily by steering the game into "closed" or cramped positions, which computers found almost impossible to evaluate. The humans would then employ long-term strategy rather than short-term tactics to accumulate a series of tiny positional advantages that would eventually become overwhelming. Today, computers and their programmers have wised up.

"The techniques grandmasters used to apply to knock over these programmes like ninepins no longer work," says Mr Nunn. Indeed, apart from being able to draw on a database of every chess opening and variation known to man, Deep Junior can adopt different playing styles, too.

In many ways, the computer's normal playing style is similar to that of Mr Kasparov. One aspect is based firmly in the solid, positional approach laid down by William Steinitz, the first world champion, and developed by the "hyper-modern" Soviet School in the 20th century. Another is more akin to the aggressive, swashbuckling tactics of the 19th century players, who would often give away a pawn or more in return for a lightning attack on the opponent's king.

Deep Junior will doubtless display much of this fighting chess over the next two weeks. But if , at any time, its programmers feel things are not going to plan, they have only to push a few buttons to produce what for Mr Kasparov will seem like a very different opponent