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Chess man vs machine stalemate

Kasparov faces Deep Junior but neither could secure the vital second victory.
Kasparov faces Deep Junior but neither could secure the vital second victory.

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NEW YORK -- Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has drawn against a computer in a six game man vs machine contest.

Kasparov was attempting to avenge his defeat in 1997 by IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.

This time around, playing in New York against Deep Junior, Kasparov and the computer won one match each and drew the remaining four.

Kasparov appeared to be in a winning position when he first offered Junior the chance to accept a draw, an offer which was refused only for the computer to offer Kasparov a draw five moves later.

The 39-year-old grandmaster was booed by the crowd for accepting the draw but after the match he was unrepentant.

He said he would have pressed for a win in a similar position against a human opponent but he feared even a tiny mistake would have been severely punished by the computer.

"I had one item on my agenda: not to lose. I decided it would be wiser to stop playing," Kasparov said.

Deep Junior can process 3 million chess moves per second -- far fewer than Deep Blue's 200 million, but Deep Junior's Israeli programmers say it thinks more like a human, choosing strategy over simply capturing pieces quickly.

Deep Blue made chess history six years ago when it defeated then-world champion Kasparov in a six-game match in New York.

Last October, current world champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia tied his eight-game match 4-4 against a German-built program called Deep Fritz in Bahrain.

Deep Junior, which won last year's world computer chess championship, and Kasparov each won $250,000 for the match played over 12 days. Kasparov was also being paid a $500,000 appearance fee.

Azerbaijan-born Kasparov is considered by many chess experts to be the greatest player in chess history and is still ranked No. 1 ahead of Kramnik by the International Chess Federation, known by its French acronym FIDE.



Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

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