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Issue 9.10 | Oct 2001
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This Time It's Personal

Humankind battles to reclaim the chess-playing championship of the world.

By Rudy Chelminski

It is a balmy weekend in April, and three chess professionals are in the picture-postcard Spanish fishing village of Cadaqués, a couple of hours' drive northeast of Barcelona. Out on the sunny terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, Ray Keene, Fred Friedel, and Enrique Irazoqui launch into learned reminiscences of tournaments they have known. Ray invariably edits their recollections in the infuriating manner of chess masters everywhere by dredging up from his elephantine memory individual games and every damn one of their moves. Fred recalls dragging a stone-drunk Mikhail Tal to the table at a blitz tournament in Saint John, New Brunswick.

"Ah, that was against Vaganian," says Ray between mouthfuls of paella. "The key move was Ne4-g5. And Tal won the tournament."

"Imagine filling your mind with stuff like that," says Enrique.

"Please pass the gambas," says Ray.

"IBM bent the rules," says Ray. "They didn't actually cheat, but they exploited every resource of the rule book to disadvantage Garry."

The three men, each attached to chess in his own manner but nicely complementary in trio, have gathered for the penultimate step of an ongoing campaign to promote, update, and vivify the world of chess, the most frustratingly simple yet fiendishly complex cerebral activity since Homo sapiens got a little time free from hunting and gathering to become Homo ludens.

The Englishman, Ray Keene, chess chronicler for The Times of London and former British champion, is founder of Brain Games, the feisty young company that staged last October's world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik. The German, Fred Friedel, is cofounder, boss, and moving spirit of the Hamburg chess software company ChessBase. The scion of a noble Barcelona family, Enrique Irazoqui is one of the world's top experts in the explosively growing field of computer chess. This multinational cast of characters is part of a small brotherhood of devoted aficionados who for generations have labored to promote chess, with the aim of proving that the game's commonly accepted effete-elitist image is false, and to tap into the estimated half-billion chess players out there in the wide world, most of whom have never set foot inside a chess club.

But misperceptions of the game aren't all that need correcting. Worse damage was done during a single week in May 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat the human world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match in New York. It was a sensational story that rippled worldwide, cast as the frightening symbolic denouement that humankind had been dreading ever since our bucolic rural existence began ceding ground to the dark, infernal mills of the Industrial Revolution: the machine dominating man in the one area where he was unique and unchallenged - his intelligence. The chess world found it devastating. "It was too much to bear," says grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The cover of Inside Chess magazine read "ARMAGEDDON!" To make matters worse, Garry compounded his defeat by behaving petulantly during the postgame press conference. Puffing and pouting, the arrogant "Beast of Baku" looked to have been properly chastised.

But is that all there was to it?

Today, insiders know that Garry had good reason to be petulant in 1997, that a lot more went on behind the scenes at that epochal encounter than the brilliant programming of a team of corporate geeks. "IBM bent the rules," says Ray flatly. "They didn't actually cheat, but they exploited every resource of the rule book to disadvantage Garry. He would have won if they'd played fair with him." Most grandmasters, even those who regularly get kicked all over the chessboard by Kasparov, agree.

The background to the affair was Kasparov's convincing win over the machine in a six-game series the previous year in Philadelphia, which thus sustained the rash, youthful boast he had made in 1987: "No computer can ever beat me." When he went into the second match against IBM's updated program, he was as overconfident as Big Blue was thirsty for revenge. Fred recalls an optimistic Garry going into the match harboring cheery impressions of talks he'd entered into with IBM about co-developing a gigantic chess portal, only to hit a glass wall as the match began and discover that the game was lethal. For a year, the Deep Blue team had been ferociously preparing and revving up its public relations engine for a high-profile battle. Says Seirawan, "It had suddenly become Ali-Frazier."

More important than attitudes, though, was that Kasparov and his team had negotiated the match contract abominably. Whereas, in any chess match of significance, players study their opponent-to-be's previous games - often every game of every tournament in their history - Deep Blue had played no matches, save the one against Kasparov in 1996. So, although the contract stipulated that Kasparov would have access to all Deep Blue's previous games played in public, when he actually requested the printouts, IBM blandly said sorry, there were no public games. The entire oeuvre of the machine had been executed in private sessions with the company's team. Oh. So Garry did something he had never done before: He went into the match blind, playing an unknown opponent, while every game he had ever played was in the computer's memory. Moreover, he had agreed to the insane conditions of a match without adjournments.

In game two, an even more bitter disadvantage became apparent. At that point, a single move on the part of Deep Blue shocked not just Garry but the whole grandmaster community hungrily following along. Rather than capture an exposed pawn, the machine chose another route - a strange sacrifice that in '97 seemed far beyond the strategic foresight of a computer. "It was an incredibly refined move," says Seirawan, "of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy."

Nothing the machine had done in the 1996 match, nor anything it had done in game one, suggested it could or would make such calculations. The move represented a style of play out of keeping with anything that had gone before. "There were only three explanations," says Malcolm Pein, chess correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London, who worked for IBM on the Web site for the match. "Either we were seeing some kind of vast quantum leap in chess programming that none of us knew about, or we were seeing the machine calculate far more deeply than anyone heard it could, or a human had intervened during the game."

Rudy Chelminski (rudychelminski@aol.com) is a contributing writer for Smithsonian. He lives in France.

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