Vladimir Kramnik, world chess champion, and the team behind chess computer Deep Fritz 7 said they would be happy to stage a replay after the human versus computer chess match ended in a 4-4 tie early in October, the organizers said on their Web site.
The match, which was locked at 3-3 after Deep Fritz won two consecutive games, fizzled out as the last two games ended in quick draws, after 28 moves and just 21 moves in the final game, in which Kramnik had the advantage of the white pieces.
“Fritz will play anyone, anywhere, anytime,” the program’s German developer Chessbase GmbH stated on the organizers’ Web site. “We’ve learned a lot from this, and there is much we can do to increase Fritz’s playing strength.”
“It is now clear that the top program and the world champion are approximately equal.”
Kramnik collected US$800,000 in prize money for drawing the match.
Over the years, scientists and philosophers have debated whether the ability of computers to play good chess is a sign of “artificial intelligence” or whether the computer is competitive simply because of its gigantic processing capability.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky has been reported as saying that a computer program beating a grandmaster at chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weightlifting competition.
The idea of a chess machine dates in its modern form from 1945, when the U.K. mathematician Alan Turing, in a paper called A Proposed Electronic Calculator wrote that “the machine could probably be made to play very good chess.”