Over the past sixteen years, chess computers have made significant progress in the battles against people. We have enough examples of human-computer chess matches proving it.
The first loudest sensation was the victory of a chess computer with the romantic name Deep Blue in 1997 over Garry Kasparov with a score of 3.5 to 2.5 points.
In October 2002, Vladimir Kramnik played a draw with the computer “Deep Fritz“. Kramnik won in the second and third games and the computer in the fifth and sixth one. At the same time, the first, fourth, seventh and eighth games ended in a draw.
From January 26 to February 7, 2003, a match was held in New York between Garry Kasparov and the chess computer Deep Junior 7. The legendary grandmaster won in the first game. However, the total score of the meeting was 3:3.
In the same year, a match was held in New York between Garry Kasparov and another chess computer named “X3dFritz”. Each of the opponents won one game, and two games ended in a draw.
The loudest victories of chess computers occurred in 2004-2006. In 2004, in two games against the world champion, a chess computer called “Hydra” won. In 2005, the same computer “Hydra” triumphed in a match of six games against Michael Adams. The score was 5.5 to 0.5. It has to be noted, that Adams at that time was the seventh strongest in the world rankings.
A year later, a trio of chess computer champions (“Hydra”, “Deep Fritz” and “Junior”) defeated a team of three famous grandmasters (Ruslan Ponomarev, Veselin Topalov, and Sergey Karyakin) with a total score of 8.5 to 3.5 points.
The truth is that in all these victories the human factor played a big role. The grandmasters made a series of rude mistakes, which led to their defeat. Another factor in the success of these computers was the ability to change the database of the program during the match. World champions Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik chose the correct tactical schemes for fights in their human-computer chess matches. They chose little-known debuts, exchanged and quickly moved into a figured endgame.
A losing option for the player will be an attempt to surpass chess computers in a combinational game.
In the same match, Vladimir Kramnik decided in one game to go in an adventure sacrificing a bishop for a couple of pawns. The computer calculated the checkmate attack and repulsed it. Human-computer chess matches showed us that chess computers are brilliant in defense. While a regular person becomes nervous under a threat of a checkmate, this is an ordinary mathematical problem for a computer.
Nevertheless, electronic computers are still very far from the human mind. In fact, all the losses of grandmasters took place because of terrible mistakes. Creative, irrational thinking – that’s what makes a person much stronger than a machine!
