Deep Blue Beats Chess Master In Second Game Called Best Game A Computer Ever Played

Score one for the techies. IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov on Sunday evening their six-game series at one game apiece.

Kasparov resigned after the computer’s 45th move, which had positioned Deep Blue for a winning endgame. The game lasted just short of four hours.

Kasparov, a 34-year-old Russian, defeated Deep Blue in Saturday’s opening game of the series, when the computer resigned after Kasparov’s 45th move.

“It’s clearly the best game that’s ever been played against Kasparov by a computer,” said Mike Valvo, an international chess master.

Kasparov did not appear at a news conference after the game and he was not expected to discuss the loss.

Joel Benjamin, a chess grandmaster who consulted with the IBM team, was exultant.

“I feel great. This is what I’ve been working towards for eight months. … This was a game that any human grandmaster would have been proud to play. This was not computer chess. This was real chess.”

Kasparov defeated the computer last year and says that barring human error, man will always be better than the machine at chess. But IBM technicians said they had improved Deep Blue since the last match - the machine can now examine an average of 200 million positions per second.

In their first match - held in Philadelphia in February 1996 - Kasparov lost badly to Deep Blue in the first game, then rallied back to win the second, fifth and sixth games. Man and machine played to a draw in the third and fourth games.

On Sunday, the computer played white, which gave the machine the slight advantage of making the first move.

As on Saturday, about 450 people paid $25 each to watch a video feed of Game 2 in a sold-out first-floor auditorium at the Equitable Center, a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. The game was played on the building’s 35th floor.

Game 3 is scheduled for today. The winner of the match takes home $700,000 of a $1.1 million purse.