NEWS

Düsseldorf in Germany using 3-D CHESS: Garry Kasparov, the top

the vOICe system and other human player takes an in-depth
(stereoscopic) view of the board in a
sensory substitution devices. match against Fritz, the German
Meijer likens the process of chess-playing program.
learning to recognize sounds as
shapes to acquiring a foreign
language. Novices begin by
mastering an elementary visual
alphabet: a circle, a rectangle, a
triangle, an oval. Since, gener-
ally speaking, all other shapes
can be said to be combinations
of these, the wearer of such a
device begins to gain “fluency”
that makes recognizing
whether a door is open or
closed, or whether a chair is
occupied, almost second
nature. A deeper understand-
ing of the reason for such a
sensory crossover could lead to
Psyching Out Computer
quicker and more effective
adaptation to the vOICe
Chess Players
system, which Meijer says is Chess programs keep getting better,
sorely needed. but grandmasters have learned to anticipate their game

VOICE HEADSET: An early version.
Cellphone camera or video camera on
eyeglasses draw less attention.
Though it takes time to
learn to use, the vOICe system
has some devotees. The vOICe
Web site, http://www.
seeingwithsound.com, con-
tains diary entries of one of
the first people to use a
vOICe device. She noted that
over time, as she grew more
accustomed to the system’s
drone, her recognition of ob-
The more deeply a com-
puter chess program is
allowed to calculate, the
better it plays, and with the
inexorable march of Moore’s
Law, the programs have got-
ten much better over the
years. Why, then, do the
very best grandmasters still
hold their own against the
silicon beasts?
A few months ago, in
New York City, Garry
Kasparov, the top-rated
player in the world, drew a
match against a leading
chess program from
Germany that runs on an
Intel Xeon server with four
2.8-GHz processors and 4GB
of RAM. Kasparov faced a
special, three-dimensional-
display version of his oppo-
nent [see photo, “3-D
Chess”]. The previous year
he had drawn the Israeli pro-
gram Deep Junior in the
same venue. Sometime be-
fore that match, Vladimir
Kramnik, ranked second
worldwide, had drawn an
earlier version of Fritz.
Yet while the computers
are running on faster hard-
ware, with better software
and larger databases of chess
openings, humans are pretty
much stuck with the brains
they have. We carbon-based
life forms don’t get upgrades
every 20 months, at least not
after our mid-20s, when
grandmasters tend to peak.
Kasparov, the most success-
ful player ever, is 40, with
more than a few gray hairs,
and, if anything, he ought to
be getting weaker.
Why, then, can the ma-
chines still not blow him off
the board?
Sheer hardware power
ought to tell—some day.
Way back in 1982, the leg-
endary programmer Kenneth
Thompson staged a land-
mark experiment that deter-
mined exactly how much
TOP TO BOTTOM: BEBETO MATTHEWS/AP,

jects around her home im- better a chess program

proved dramatically. And in a would play if given the op-
PETER MEIJER, BRYAN CHRISTIE

development that was a sur- portunity to look further

prise to even Meijer and his ahead. (Thompson, a re-
colleagues, she reported expe- searcher at Bell Laboratories
riencing gradual development
TOUCHÉ! By playing his rook up a square, to b2, Kasparov pushed
of depth perception. the computer’s “search horizon” so far into the future that it could
—WILLIE D. JONES not see its only hope: to prepare the advance of its kingside pawns.

14 IEEE Spectrum | February 2004 | NA

in Murray Hill, N.J., was a de-
signer of Unix.) Thompson
pitted his then-top chess ma-
chine, Belle, against itself in
hundreds of games, calculat-
ing its play on one side of the
board a half-move deeper
than its play on the other
side. (A half-move is a move
by one player; the full move is
completed when the other
player replies.)
The side with the extra
half-move won three games
out of four, corresponding to a
200-point gap in chess rat-
ing—roughly the difference
between a typical grandmaster
(about 2600) and Kasparov
(2830). Increased search depth
continues to this day to pro-
vide the same edge—for pro-
grams playing other programs.
While Fritz
dithered, moving
pieces back and
forth, Kasparov
methodically
shoved a pawn
down its throat
Human opponents are a
different story because carbon
and silicon players have dif-
ferent strengths and weak-
nesses, the proper exploita-
tion of which has not been
fully worked out. There is
therefore plenty of room
for improvement.
The human weak point lies
in calculation, while the com-
puter’s is in long-term strate-
gy. The trick is to prepare
openings that push the other
side into the kind of game that
accentuates its weaknesses. A
good example came in the
third game of the recent
match, when an opening inno-
vation on move nine gave
Kasparov not merely the su-
perior game but one that Fritz
could not understand—a bar-
ricaded position that required
each side to mount glacially
slow maneuvers against care-
fully chosen targets. So slow
were the maneuvers that the
machine could not see their
point until it was too late.
The situation was that
Kasparov, playing white, ad-
vanced on the queenside (the
side of the board to white’s
left), leaving Fritz free to ad-
vance on the kingside. Fritz
should have begun by pushing
its king bishop pawn from its
initial square, on f7, to f4,
where it could be exchanged
for white’s king pawn, on e3.
That would have opened lines
for black’s rooks and created
weaknesses around the square
f2 (white’s king bishop pawn)
for black to attack the uncas-
tled white king.
Kasparov made sure that
Fritz would never see the light
at the end of that tunnel by
making the tunnel longer. He
played his rook on the left
side up a square to b2 [see
chessboard, “Touché!”], there-
by defending the f2 square
even though it wasn’t yet at-
tacked. The future weakness
at that point was therefore
pushed beyond the computer’s
search horizon, so it never got
around to advancing on the
kingside at all.
Instead, Fritz dithered,
moving its pieces back and
forth while Kasparov method-
ically shoved a pawn down its
throat, to make a new queen.
Michael Greengard, a veteran
chess commentator, called
Kasparov’s move “a classic
piece of anticomputer play,
the sort of thing I did against
the laptop chess machines
of the 1980s.”
Fritz did better in the games
where it could get its pieces
flying about. Indeed, Kasparov
says it plays better than IBM’s
Deep Blue did in 1997, when it
shockingly defeated Kasparov.
In a critical position from that
match, Deep Blue missed a
subtle line of play that would
have led to a draw, which
Kasparov also overlooked.
“Fritz today finds the draw in
two minutes,” Kasparov said
with a smile. “But, of course,
we humans are learning too.”
—PHILIP E. ROSS