It’s now impossible to imagine our civilization without computers: they are virtually everywhere. Chess is one more field where computers do quite well. With the arrival of chess programs and the growth of computers’ calculating capacities, they started talking about the dawn of Artificial Intelligence. That’s what we are going to discuss here: the computer in chess or computer chess.

Clone Attack

In the last decade computers became an indispensable tool in chess masters training. It was becoming hard to operate huge databases of opening variations and chess games without personal computers. Today, a PC with a personal openings library is one of the attributes of a chess master. The computer was gaining its ground slowly, but surely. Kramnik is said to have started using computers the last of all super grandmasters. When his more “advanced” colleagues were all into chess software, he was still scribbling variants down into an old copybook. But eventually he couldn’t resist the progress, either.

With the arrival of chess software and powerful PCs, chess openings were studied more effectively. You could make the computer analyze a position and use the results of the analysis later. A lot of popular openings are now traced to deep endgames. The theory of openings reaches dozens of moves into the game and a novelty on a twentieth move is no surprise today, unlike the novelty on the tenth move, where everything seems to be studied inside out already. However, we will see that it is not so true yet.

Many known players are criticized for winning games by using computers at home and thus having wider knowledge of game starts. They often use new untypical moves in the beginning of the game. Kasparov is a player of the kind. On the one hand, his style means getting advantage right from the start. On the other hand, he gave cause for this criticism himself having pioneered the use of computers in training.

But the problems of analytical work of professional players are not so interesting for ordinary chess fans. It’s quite more fascinating to watch a battle between chess programs and a man. And that’s what we are going to talk about.

There have been two remarkable events during the last several months: two Man vs. Computer matches with much publicity and a round sum of prize money. First, the human world champion Vladimir Kramnik met Fritz, the world champion among chess programs, in an eight-game match. Then it was the turn of Kasparov, who is the leader of the FIDE rating list, to play six games against Junior program. Junior was also a world champion but in a different year. These two chess programs haven’t met with each other so we can’t say which one is stronger until the next computer world championship. We know that these two programs play different chess, though. Fritz is inclined to positional game, while Junior likes attacking. It was said that Fritz resembled Kramnik’s style, while Junior – Kasparov’s. So, the grandmasters played against their electronic incarnations.

As our web-site is about computers, I have to write specifically about the successes of the electronic brain, but I suppose that the reader knows the names of Kasparov and Kramnik. If not, there is a link at the end of the article to a literary description of the inhabitants of the chess kingdom.