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Kasparov Sinks Under Weight of Deep Blue

Deep Blue shook the blues last night.

After suffering a stinging loss Saturday night, the IBM supercomputer roared back yesterday to beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the second game of their six-game rematch.

Kasparov resigned after Deep Blue's 45th move, which put the computer in position to win the game. The dramatic competition, which took place in a New York skyscraper, lasted just under four hours. It featured a cautious but deliberate offensive charge by the International Business Machines Corp. computer from the very beginning, placing the human champion in an hours-long defensive crouch before he eventually was squeezed into an untenable position.

It is only the second time in history that a computer has defeated a grandmaster in a classical chess game. Kasparov, 34, lost the first game of their previous match in February 1996 to a less powerful version of Deep Blue, before charging back to win.

But yesterday, for the first time, a computer played with a finesse that made chess lovers proud. "This was history in the making," said Ronald W. Henley, a U.S. chess grandmaster who watched the game. "In that past, Deep Blue and other computers have played a brute force kind of chess. . . . This game, though, was of such high quality that any grandmaster would have been proud to have played the computer's moves."

"This was not computer chess," Joel Benjamin, a former U.S. chess champion who advised the IBM team, told a crowd of about 500 that was watching a closed-circuit broadcast in the same building. "This was real chess."

Chess has long been viewed as one of the best expressions of human intelligence. The match between Kasparov and Deep Blue is being cast by some observers as a man-vs.-machine fight, akin to John Henry's legendary contest against a steam drill.

Although Kasparov had been favored to win by several computer and chess specialists, yesterday's performance threw some of that oddsmaking into doubt. "It's a bit frightening," said Malcolm Pein, an international chess master and the editor of London-based Chess Monthly magazine. "Many of us weren't expecting Deep Blue to play this well."

Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 SP, can analyze about 200 million positions per second. A 1.4-ton machine with 32 microprocessors that work in tandem, the computer relies on a complex series of equations to interpret which position to choose.

Yesterday's victory is a major boost to IBM, which initiated the match to show off its technology.

"We feel great," Joe Hoane, a member of the IBM team, said last night. "We showed we can play at the level of a world champion."

Kasparov left the game without speaking to the audience as he had done Saturday night.

Deep Blue played yesterday with the white pieces, a slight advantage because it was allowed to move first. The computer opened with a series of moves referred to as the "Spanish game," named after Ruy Lopez, a 16th-century Spanish priest who played chess.

Both players started quickly, dispensing with the first 17 moves in 20 minutes. Then the game settled down to a slower pace, with Kasparov frequently hunched over the board, cradling his head in his hands as he contemplated his next move.

Kasparov played a largely defensive game, highlighted by the 21st move, when he retreated his queen. Deep Blue, on the other hand, established control over a greater portion of the board, slowly fortifying an attack posture.

The defensive style is rare for Kasparov, who traditionally attacks his opponents. Some observers suggested that Kasparov was trying to set up an impregnable defense that would force a draw.

Between moves 28 and 34, however, Kasparov's position quickly began to weaken, some chess experts watching the game said. By the 37th move, the computer appeared to have a definite positional advantage.

"At that point, it was clearly going to be a shutout," Pein said.

On the 45th move, Deep Blue moved its rook down the board in a position that would have forced both sides to sacrifice their queens. That would left the computer in a position to promote one of its pawns, an indefensible situation for Kasparov.

Chess experts said Deep Blue lost Saturday's game because it played a little too aggressively, especially toward the end of the game, when it tried to attack some of Kasparov's pieces. The computer's designers said they planned to spend the hours between the matches looking at ways to fine-tune the machine's playing style.

Yesterday, the experts said, the computer appeared to play a more conservatively.

Computer scientists have spent decades trying to develop software and hardware that can beat the world's top chess players, with the hope that their efforts would lead to breakthroughs in developing computers that show signs of artificial intelligence. That hasn't happened -- Deep Blue, for instance, can't learn from its mistakes -- but the underlying technology is expected to be used for various commercial applications including weather forecasting and pharmaceutical research.

The winner of the $1.1 million rematch will take home $700,000. The third game is scheduled to take place tomorrow in New York.