Once again, the chess World Champion has played a match against a computer, and lost. This time the victor was Deep Fritz 10, and the victim was the 31-year-old Russian Vladimir Kramnik.
Kramnik lost the six-game match 4-2, with four draws and two losses. The match included an astonishing blunder by Kramnik in the second game: the reigning champion, with an even position at the 34th move, overlooked mate in one, and was immediately dispatched.
One tends to root for the human in these matches, but it’s futile, really; while the very best carbon-based players may still be able to get these programs to break an occasional sweat, that won’t be the case much longer. Rather than wallowing in John Henry-style bathos, we might as well just move on, I think, keeping in mind that it was, after all, we humans who built these contraptions in the first place.
Anyway, for the morbidly curious among you, I have found links to the six games, in interactive embedded-chessboard form. Here they are: