Pictures from the Big Apple

New York is a gigantic, exciting, daunting place. Just getting there from the Old Country takes a whopping nine hours (everything else in Europe is one hour away). Arriving there to prepare for a high-profile Man vs Machine match makes it all the more nerve-fraying, especially when everybody keeps reminding you that the ability of many millions of viewers to follow the action on the Internet depends wholly on your solving the miriade of technical problems that try to prevent exactly that from happening. (Memo: must keep sentences shorter).

On this page you will find some pictorial impressions of your jet-lagged and slightly dazed correspondent. Naturally this cannot be a well-structured pictorial report on New York on this page. Who had time so far to go on a systematic photo expedition. Only occasionally would we – the perennial ChessBase team of Mig 'n Me – have time to whip out our digital cameras and capture the very fleeting moments. All pictures on this page are by Frederic Friedel and Mig Greengard.

New York, Central Park in Winter – a view from the balcony outside the playing hall.

Mig and Cheryl trying to drop a communications line from the playing hall to the press room two stories below.

Is it long enough? Look veeerrry carefully over the edge. Well, it did actually work, and we got an Internet line up and running about 90 seconds before the first game began.

Another view from the playing hall. New York is all about towering buildings and geometrically aligned streets.

The world famous Times Square on Saturday evening

The signs of the Times. These electronic billboards are truly gigantic.

The playing site in the 12th story of the New York Athletic Club.

The Deep Junior team arrive: Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky

The computer that is playing Kasparov: an eight times 1.6 GHz Intel processor system with eight GBytes of available RAM memory.

The backup system with four 1.9 GHz processors and 4 GB of RAM. On day zero the Junior team was still running tests to see if this system was in fact a little faster.

Let the games begin: Arbiter Geurt Gijssen, chess player Garry Kasparov, FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, computer programmer Amir Ban, X3D CEO Eliot Klein, programmer Shay Bushinsky.

Ilyumzhinov starts game one by ceremonially executing White's first move.

The first moves...

... and settling down for the battle.

Freshly crowned US women's champion Anna Hahn with the head of the Athletic's Club Chess section (with Evyette Nagel-Seirwan and Ilya Gurevich in the background).