Report Two: Opening Press Conference
by Malcolm Pein in Bahrain

The next day, Thursday, we went to the venue for a press conference. The match takes place at the Mindsports Centre in the Bahrain capital Manama, which is a beautiful building in Arab style.

In keeping with the match, it is a fusion of old and new. At its centre there is an elegant courtyard in which the Einstein outside broadcast team have placed a giant plasma screen which is linked to the computer and shows the board position. There is also a traditional tent with its own air conditioning system, which is absolutely essential because the temperature is around 40 degrees. When its not switched on the tent turns into a sauna in about five minutes.

Einstein are making a series of television programmes with the commentary team which will be broadcast on the Arabsat satellite channels and Reuters TV are also here but the BBC turned down the right to broadcast edited highlights. Einstein are hopeful they will take a documentary program.

Kramnik said he would be happy with just the narrowest of victories against Deep Fritz when asked how many points he would be satisfied with he said 4.5. Kramnik takes home $900,000 if he wins the match, $700,000 if it ends level and $500,000 if the machine gets the better of him in the eight game contest. The World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik is one of the most unpleasant possible opponents for us” was the assessment of Team Fritz head of delegation Frederic Friedel. “Players like Judit Polgar and Garry Kasparov are much easier for our program to play against, they like to pick a fight and we reach the right kind of positions for computers. Kramnik is so solid, he takes the game into positions where strategy is more important than tactics” There was a funny moment when Friedel referred to Kramnik’s winning run in Classical Chess of seventy five games. Kramnik interjected “it was more, maybe ninety but I didn’t count”

Vladimir Kramnik, Frederic Friedel and event organiser Justin Rickets

Much discussion focussed on the last Man v Machine challenge in 1997 when Deep Blue defeated the then world champion Garry Kasparov. Frederic said that although Deep Blue calculated two hundred million positions per second and Deep Fritz just three and a half million his program shared information on position evaluation between its computer processors all over the tree of calculations whereas Deep Blue’s massive parallel processors worked in isolation and so it analysed the same positions several times. Speaking on Bahrain television Nigel Short said that Kasparov had played “unbelievably badly” in 1997.

Kramnik signs autographs