Like the grizzled superhero Magnus, Robot Fighter stepping from an old 1960s Russ Manning comicbook cover, Garry Kasparov pushed his queen’s pawn forward two squares Sunday afternoon and began humanity’s latest chess battle against computers. The last time he tried defend humanity’s honor in chess against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997, he lost. That 1.4-ton refrigerator-size machine was a calculating monster, with 418 processors that routinely chewed through 200 million chess positions a second. Mr. Kasparov lost the six-game encounter by a single game and contended that Deep Blue might have cheated by obtaining advice from human experts during the games, an assertion that IBM denied. Mr. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and mothballed Deep Blue.

Kasparov’s latest machine opponent is known as Deep Junior. Rather than a custom-made chess-playing machine like Deep Blue, Deep Junior is a program; a single-processor version of it can be purchased for less than $50 and run on a PC. Against Kasparov, Deep Junior is planned to be run on only eight processors making it much slower than the retired Deep Blue, but experts say Junior had more chess knowledge built into it. “Junior is a street brawler,” chess programmer Frederic Friedel said. “You remember `West Side Story’? It’s the Jets. It will be constantly taunting Garry. `Do you want to fight with knives? Whips? Pistols? Machine guns? You choose the weapon.’ If he [Kasparov] knows what’s best for him, he’ll say, `Let’s stay in the ring and keep these big soft gloves on.’” The match will be played at the New York Athletic Club with play starting at 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 26, 28, and 30, and on Feb. 2, 5, and 7. Each game will last at most seven hours. You can follow this current ongoing epic struggle between man and machine in either 2D or 3D realtime representations. Root for Kasparov, resistance is not futile – we hope. “The match will be close, but I’m determined to win,” Mr. Kasparov said. “One thing I know is that humans’ days at the top of the chess world are limited. I give us just a few years.”

[editor's note, by Drog] The Globe & Mail reports that Kasparov has defeated Deep Junior in the opening game.