MARK RUBERY CHESS

It was reported from Hollywood that Walt Disney Studios has purchased the screen rights to Matthew Charman’s play ‘The Machine’. Charman will adapt his play about the 1997 chess match between the IBM computer Deep Blue and its designer Dr. Hsu, pitted against World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. While this was the pivotal match where the computer surpassed man for the first time in its ability to play the royal game (something that Kasparov himself would vehemently disagree with) the match in 2005 between Hydra and the English GM Michael Adams was the defining moment that announced man had been left far behind… Like the beginning of the ‘Terminator’ films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the defeat of GM Michael Adams by the Computer program Hydra 0,5-5,5 in 2005 underlined the dominance of the machine over man. Earlier only Kramnik was seen as a worthy opponent for these silicon beasts, but he had some inexplicable lapses before going down to Fritz. Your run of the mill grandmaster like Jan Ehlvest even played these machines accepting pawn odds before succumbing to the inevitable. Fellow English GM David Norwood wrote the following prescient article before the Hydra match: “So does Mickey have any chance at all? On paper, one would have to say “no”. It is ten years since computers started beating the best players in the world, and technology has come a long way since then. There is no logical reason why any human would have a chance. Mickey is a genius and one of my oldest friends. I’ve supported him against the world’s titans and on his day he has beaten them all. But this is no ordinary opponent. For Adams to win it would demand a human miracle. Miracles do happen … just not at 200 million moves a second.” In game four Hydra demonstrated its awesome endgame technique when it outplayed one of the best players in the world from a roughly equal position. Adams,M (2737) - HYDRA [B23] Man-Machine London ENG (4) 2005 1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 d6 3.Nge2 Nf6 4.g3 g6 5.Bg2 Nc6 6.d4 cxd4 7.Nxd4 Nxd4 8.Qxd4 Bg7 9.0–0 0–0 10.a4 Qa5 11.Qd3 Bd7 12.Nd5 Nxd5 13.Qxd5 Qxd5 14.exd5

(Adams has handled the opening phase somewhat timidly in his desire to extract all the tension from the position. Formerly one would consider this an optimum strategy against a computer program, yet such are their advances in this phase of the game, that we now witness a very strong grandmaster being technically

ground down from a virtually equal position) ...Bf6 15.c3 a5 16.Re1 Rfb8 17.Bf1 b5 18.axb5 Bxb5 19.Bxb5 Rxb5 20.Rd1 Rc8 21.Ra4 Rcc5 22.c4 Rb3 23.Be3 Rc8 24.Bd4 Kg7 25.Kf1 Bxd4 26.Rxd4 Rxb2 27.Rxa5 f5 28.Ra7 Kf6 29.g4 Rb4 30.g5+ Kxg5 31.Rxe7 Rcxc4 32.Rxc4 Rxc4 33.Rxh7 Kf6 34.Rd7 Ke5 35.Rg7 Rg4 36.f3 Rg5 37.Kf2 Kxd5 38.h4 Rh5 39.Kg3 Rh6 40.Re7 Kd4 41.Re1 d5 42.Rd1+ Ke5 43.Re1+ Kd6 44.Rd1 Rh5 45.Ra1 Kc5 46.Rc1+ Kb4 47.Rd1 Kc4 48.Rc1+ Kd3 49.Rc6 Rh6 50.h5 f4+ 0–1 Perhaps Adams should have negotiated a different purse structure as $25,000 was awarded per game for a win and he earned just $10,000 for his solitary draw. The book ‘Combat: my fifty years at the chessboard’ (1977) by the American master, Sidney Bernstein is distinctive from almost any other games compilation by the complete absence of chess diagrams. The author considered such things to be anachronistic and a waste of space as it encouraged readers to ‘skim’ a book’s contents.