Deep Blue Deep-Sixed By Chessmaster Kasparov

World chess champion Garry Kasparov won his final game over a supercomputer Saturday, sealing a victory in the historic six-game match pitting man against machine.

Kasparov forced IBM’s Deep Blue to concede after 43 moves in 3 hours, 46 minutes.

Needing only a draw, he nonetheless attacked from the first move, seeming determined to trounce a computer that can calculate more than 200 million moves a second.

The computer had defeated Kasparov in the first game Feb. 10, but Kasparov won the second and fifth games and earned draws in the third and fourth.

Yasser Seirawan, a commentator and international grandmaster, marveled at Deep Blue’s unprecedented chess skill, despite its loss.

“I was stunned by its depth of analysis and how quickly it could move,” he said. “It was unnerving - you want to say, ‘Can’t you even show a bead of sweat?”’ Seirawan estimated that the computer would rank among the 60 best players in the world.