At one point in my life I thought it might be a good chess player. In the mid-80 collected and reviewed annotated games by Leontxo Garcia in El País -what big- and even I tried to make my first steps a little more seriously and played a federated year. Enough to realize that it would be better devoted to  write, but I always kept my love of a sport for years to continue sideways.

I did in those legendary duels between Karpov and Kasparov, but also with a nod to the passion that became part of my job: computer science. Expectantly read the news about the fighting between grandmasters and chess computers and cheated me over and over again thinking the man would always be higher than the machine. Absurd, as demonstrate a machine called Deep Blue the 11th of May 1997.

The beginning of the end

Leontxo Garcia wrote it better than anyone again in the country. In ” Man surrenders to the machine ” (curious, lack the tilde in the headline) this journalist recounted how Gari Kasparov ended up leaving the sixth game and losing by 3.5 to 2.5 against Deep Blue after an unexplainable mistake just initiated opening. IBM ride later much a tribute website as another to revisit the games that especially cool because web 1.0 is all.

Kasparov -leed this column his 1996 Time, please-, like the rest of those who attended that, do not believe. It could not have happened. There had to be trick. The legendary grandmaster accused the Deep Blue team of cheating and human intervention in the game Deep Blue, too “creative” at specific moments like that end of the first game (won by Kasparov) in which motion machine 44 he moved his rook for no apparent purpose.Continue reading →