During
the tournament between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep Fritz 10, another
man versus machine match was taking place in Florence during
the Festival of Creativity organized by the government of that
famous Italian city.
The
human player was twenty‑year‑old Grand Master Teimour
Radjabov, from Azerbaijan. The computer he played against was
Deep Junior 10, a program developed by Israeli scientists.
Both
players, the human as well as the cybernetic, have several brilliant
accomplishments on their résumés.
Teimour
Radjabov was once the Junior World Champion, and today he has
the eleventh highest ELO on the planet. Deep Junior 10 won the
Computer Chess World Championship celebrated during the last
Chess Olympics in Turin.
Only
one game was played this time. The young Azerbaijani opted for
playing as aggressively as he "humanly" could, which
probably led to his defeat. The time control, ninety minutes
per player, plus twenty‑five seconds after each move,
provided a pretty severe challenge and perhaps a slightly more
conservative strategy would have been more apropos.
The
human played very well and was able to seize the initiative
in the early stages of the game. In the middle game, the situation
remained fairly even. Problems arose as Radjabov played all
his chances in the endgame.
Then,
as you will be able to see in the diagram, the position of the
pieces became incredibly complicated and the analytical capacities
of the lithium brain won again. The result is very clear– the
second loss from two of the best human players against the new
high‑tech chess programs, which means hard times have
fallen upon the neurons.
