Kasparov and thirty years of computer chess

Garry Kasparov and thirty years of computer chess

By Frederic Friedel

In 1984 Garry Kasparov played a World Championship "first to win six" match against Anatoly Karpov. After nine games he was 0-4, after which there followed a series of 17 successive draws. Kasparov then lost game 27, and standing on the 0-6 precipice he fought back with another series of draws until game 32, in which he defeated Karpov. Another 14 draws followed, after which Kasparov won games 47 and 48 to narrow the scores to 3-5. At this point FIDE President Florencio Campomanes ended the match without result and announced that a new match would be started six months later. The termination was controversial, and Kasparov spoke out vehemently against it at the February 15 FIDE press conference in Moscow.

In 1985, before the new match was held, Der SPIEGEL, Europe's biggest and most influential news magazine, invited Kasparov to Hamburg for a major interview – and to play a title preparation match against top German GM Robert Hübner. The interview was a sensation – frank, courageous, outspoken, something we had not seen before from a Soviet citizen. I am delighted to see that it is still online, in German, with Google doing a fair job of translating it.

I was part of the organisation of the Spiegel events surrounding the Kasparov visit and saw the original title that was prepared for that week's edition. It was a stunning image of the young chess genius – I only have a black and white photo of it (above left). Unfortunately just before the magazine hit the newsstands there was a football catastrophe in Belgium and the Kasparov title was dumped for a new cover story (above right: "War in the Stadium").

The above shots are from the preparation of the Hübner match. In the top picture we see Boris Spassky, who seconded the German grandmaster; Robert Hübner; the arbiter and director of the German Chess Federation Horst Metzing; and the 22-year-old World Championship challenger Garry Kasparov. On the right in the bottom picture is Werner Harenberg, a senior editor of Der Spiegel, who organised the entire action. Harenberg was a great mentor to me and sadly passed away last year.

Apart from the Hübner match, which Kasparov won 4½-1½, he participated in a number of activities, like a ten-game blindfold simul and a remarkable 32-board simul against computers. He also dropped into my home in the suburbs of Hamburg, with Harenberg and other Spiegel colleagues. In the above image I am on the right showing him some programs on the BBC Acorn computer and introducing him to the word "database", which with his vigorous encouragement was soon to become a vital instrument in chess study. (That tale has been told elsewhere and needs no repeating).

The subject of today's story is the computer simul. At the time the strongest chess playing electronic entities available to the general public were dedicated chess computers, produced by four leading manufacturers: Novag and Scisys in Hongkong, Hegener & Glaser in Germany and Fidelity in the US. These four companies sent their top models to Hamburg for the simul against Kasparov.

I helped to organize the simul and as a computer chess expert did not have a good feeling about it at all. I warned Garry that the difference to a normal simul would be that his opponents would at no stage show the slightest signs of exhaustion, they would never feel discouraged, and they would defend each game vigorously to the very end.

Preparation before the start of the 32-board computer simul in 1985

The computer operators had to execute a move when Garry appeared at the board

There was a lot of interest for the game – chess computers were new and exciting

In the striped white-and-blue shirt is GM Helmut Pfleger, one of the kibitzers

At the time we were shooting mostly in black-and-white – and these images were scanned from prints

Garry vs Mephisto: on the left with the desktop computer is programmer Richard Lang
(Mesphisto, Chess Genius), behind Kasparov in the middle is Ed Schroeder (Rebel)

So here are the historic games, played exactly thirty years ago today. Think of it: at the time the parents of some of today's grandmaster were still kids. It is interesting to run through the games and try to fathom the progress that has been made in chess programming in the last three decades.

Replay all the games from the 1985 computer simul

Select games from the dropdown menu above the board

Today computers are, shall we say, considerably stronger. My latest Komodo 9, running on an eight core notebook, is well over 3000 Elo points in playing strength. That is against other computers, the only way we can measure its performance. I suspect that against humans, if anyone would agree to play it, Komodo would score even higher, simply because humans make mistakes, get tired and are easily discouraged, something that is not a factor in computer vs computer play.

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