Kasparov's World War

By Chris Taylor

Five days before the opening move of Kasparov vs. the World, the chess champion sat in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant fighting off symptoms of a nasty head cold. Hunched over a cup of hot lemon juice and pinching his throat in pain, Garry Kasparov didn't look quite ready to rumble with the rest of the human race. Was this the world team's last, best hope at victory? Don't count on it. "There will," Kasparov says firmly, "be no mistakes in this game."

You'd better believe it. The tournament, which kicks off this Monday, pits the greatest living chess player in a single match against all comers on the Internet. Anybody who logs on (at www.zone.com can vote on a variety of moves suggested by a panel of young grand masters. The most popular move is made; 24 hrs. later, Kasparov responds. And a few sniffles aren't likely to prevent the mighty Russian from beating amateur pawn pushers like you or me into a bloody pulp. "I don't expect us to win or anything," says Irina Krush, the 15-year-old U.S. women's chess champ and world-team coach, "but it'll be a fun game."

And a closely watched one too. Quite apart from being a timely test of war by committee (take note, NATO), it's Kasparov's first public confrontation with computer technology since his match with IBM's Deep Blue in 1997. Those games, billed as a historic confrontation between man and machine, ended with man's humiliating defeat (and petulant calls by Kasparov for IBM to hand over Deep Blue's printouts; two years later, they still refuse).

This time, however, man and machine will work in harmony--on both sides. Kasparov and many of his opponents will be consulting vast databases of past games and plotting computer-assisted strategies, a practice as common in chess now as using calculators to do long division. What's new here is the vast scale. In the long run, Kasparov vs. the World may tell us more about chess and human thought processes than Deep Blue ever could. "The result is irrelevant," says Kasparov, himself a part-time computer scientist and Internet addict. "It's a big experiment."

Indeed, you could say Kasparov is experimenting on us. The idea of playing a match in cyberspace was his, and the grand master has carefully controlled the setup from start to finish. He chose the game's host--Microsoft--for its software and marketing muscle. He insisted on up-and-coming chess prodigies to lead the world team--rather than more famous rivals like Anatoly Karpov or Nigel Short--so it wouldn't become a grudge match. And he set the 24-hr. gap between moves to ensure an antiseptic game, with none of the silly blunders you get in speed chess.

All well and good. But isn't there any way we lab rats can beat the chess scientist? Grand master Daniel King, who will do the commentary, thinks the sluggish time frame could actually work in our favor. Kasparov, he says, "thrives on pressure situations" and may play less aggressive chess at a leisurely pace. Let's hope so. Otherwise, we'll have to start rooting for the head cold.

--By Chris Taylor