The "Brains in Bahrain" Chess match between the Deep Fritz 7 computer and world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has finished in a 4-4 draw, each player won twice and there were four draws. In game eight the computer became the first opponent since Garry Kasparov to give Kramnik the slip with a 21-move draw using the black pieces. Both sides are open to a rematch.The result netted Kramnik eight hundred thousand dollars. A win would have been worth one million.
The match was locked at 3 games each last week after the Kramnik lost game six despite playing "one of the best games of my life". Kramnik became world champion by defeating Gary Kasparov, who lost to IBM's Deep Blue chess computer in 1997. What makes Deep Fritz 7 special is that it is based on standard hardware, running on computers with between one and eight processors and scanning about 3 million positions per second compared with custom-built Deep Blue's 100 million positions.
The idea of pitting man against machine on the chess board has a long and interesting history beginning in 1769 when the Hungarian engineer Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built mechanical chess playing device for the amusement of the Austrian Queen Maria Theresia. The CPU in this case was a chess master cleverly hidden inside. The first chess program was written by mathemitician Alan Turing before computers were invented. Learn more by following the links below.