May the Force be with him

In a nutshell

The opening press conference was held on November 8th at the famous ESPNZone on Broadway (ESPN will be showing over 17 hours of the match live). Here are excerpts of Kasparov's statements. Full reports on the official X3D website.

• Garry Kasparov said he was excited by seeing chess at the cutting edge of technology with X3D. He admitted that playing on the computer's "home turf" of virtual reality, without a normal board and set, is a handicap, but that he was eager to find out just how it affected his play. Kasparov: reminisced about his past matches in New York against computers. "As if I didn't have enough problems with computers, now I'm playing in virtual reality. At least the prizes aren't virtual!"

• "I'll remind you that a year ago Fritz 7 drew in normal circumstances in a classical chess match against Vladimir Kramnik in an eight game match in Bahrain. Now I'm facing a tougher challenge, because Fritz has been upgraded and one year in computer technology is an eternity. It's more like 20 years by human standards."

• "I like to use a 'Star Wars' analogy. In the first movie, the only way to destroy the Death Star was to find this one little spot, this weakness, and blow it up. With computers now we are also heading for the same type of exercise. You have to find this very little soft spot and hit it exactly there, not to the left or right."

• Kasparov demonstrated the X3D screen with CEO Eliot Klein. There will be one big difference during the match: no mouse! Kasparov will make his moves by speaking and X3D Fritz will move the piece using voice recognition.

• Kasparov: "Studying the machines I always find weaknesses and soft spots in the machine's preparation, in the machine's protective shield. But it's getting more and more difficult for a human player to exploit these things."

• Kasparov: "In 10 or 20 years time, when our children look at a wooden chess set, they will they say, 'Daddy, you played chess with this? How could you use these pieces, and having to write down the moves on scoresheets and press a clock?'”

Links

• Full report on the opening ceremony
• Q&A session with Garry Kasparov
• Meet the match commentators
• Sign up for free tickets