The sports commissioner with the chess champion
The New York City Sports Commissioner Kenneth
J. Podziba has announced that New York City will host a world-class
chess championship between the world’s #1 ranked chess player, Garry Kasparov,
and computer chess champion, X3D Fritz. This battle of “Man vs. Machine” will
be the first sanctioned virtual reality chess championship and is scheduled
to take place at the New York Athletic Club November 11-18, 2003.
Full
text of the press release
During the previous Man vs Machine event Ken Podziba took time off to get
acquainted with the Internet coverage of the event. The Sports Commissioner
is getting quite involved in chess, as you can see by his support of the US
Women's Olympic team.
Word
about the New York match is certainly out. We discover that a Google
search for "X3D Fritz" retrieves 6,650 stories worldwide (this
may have increased by the time you click the above link). If you have a few
days free, and knowledge of some of the world's major languages, you may want
to browse through some of the articles. What they show is a gigantic world-wide
awareness of the upcoming event. Together with the live TV programs (including
17
hours on ESPN) and live Internet coverage on major portals (like AOL) this
could become the most widely followed chess event in history. The sponsor X3D
Technologies certainly expects no less.
Here are some ChessBase
reports on the match