Kasparov and Fritz
In 1992, I took Fritz 2 (actually a beta version of Fritz 3) with me to Cologne, where World Champion Garry Kasparov was preparing for a match. We installed the program on his HP OmniBook laptop, and he played, compulsively, around 35 blitz games, against it. Fritz won four of them. It was an historic occasion: for the first time in his life Garry had actually lost a game against a computer, albeit at fast time controls and under informal circumstances.
Here are some of the games he played:
You can find the Fritz 2 games, as well as many others – against Hort, Piket, Henley, Dzindzichashvili, etc. – in Mega Database.
In May 1994 the semiconductor company Intel staged the "World Chess Express Challenge." It was arguably the strongest blitz tournament of all time, with 17 GMs (Elo average of 2625), and one computer, running Fritz 3 on an Olivetti running the latest Intel processor, a Pentium 90 MHz.
To everyone's surprise Fritz beat GMs Chernin, Anand, Cvitan, Gelfand, Wojtkiewicz, Hjartarson, Kasparov, Kramnik and Short (in that order) to finish equal first with Kasparov. The performance calculated for the program was over 2800 points.
After a short pause there was a playoff between the world champion and the presumptuous Fritz. Garry spent the half-hour break pondering his strategy and appeared at the board in high spirits.
"I'm going to teach it a lesson," he said, "and I know exactly how I'm going to do it." In the first game he reached a promising position, but dropped the win in the endgame. Was the unthinkable going to happen? No way! In the following games Fritz met its master, who put it away with three convincing victories and a draw. The grandmasters following the games on a monitor outside the playing hall burst into enthusiastic catcalls as the computer was ground down to mate in the final game. You can find all the games of that memorable event in Mega Database.
The event made the title of a German computer chess magazine.
You can find all the games Fritz played in the Intel World Express Challenge in Mega Database
After the Intel Challenge Garry discussed the even on the premium sports program in German TV. There he played a quick demo game against Fritz – and lost. You can watch it on Youtube.
In 1995 Kasparov played against Fritz4 in London. With the black pieces, Garry went into a Classical Nimzo-Indian battle. He got a R+B+pawns versus R+N+pawns ending. He traded off his bishop for Fritz’s Knight. Then he played a very skilful endgame to win. In the second game, when Fritz had black, it chose to go into the Tarrasch Defense. Garry simplified into an ending with opposite colored bishops, got a draw and won the match.
But the program was getting stronger all the time. Frans Morsch explained:
"Fritz is built around so-called null-move search. In its search Fritz allows one side to move twice (the other side does a null-move). If the position after the null-move does not return a high value in the evaluation function, then clearly the first move did not contain a threat. Detecting such moves before they are searched to the full depth is an excellent method to speed up the search. In its latest version, Fritz manages a ten times speed-up. Selective search unavoidably introduces oversights, but these are few. In tournaments against humans and other programs, Fritz has proven to be a tough opponent when defending difficult positions."
Fritz was getting stronger. It had started participating in big opens – and scoring well. In the Bad Godesberg GM-Open it scored 5.5 points in 11 games, with an Elo performance of 2452. In May 1995 Fritz finished with a performance rating of 2554 in the Katowice GM Open.
In 1996 the EGON tournament was organized in the Hague, Holland – with fifty strong chess programs being paired with 50 strong GMs and IMs. In one round Fritz had to play a two-game match against former World Champion Anatoly Karpov. In the first game, with the black pieces, Fritz chose to go into a QGD Tarrasch, and the game ended in a draw. Karpov played positionally, tricking Fritz into giving up a little initiative here, and a little more there. He then simplified and took Fritz to an endgame, which he then won rather easily. In the second game, Karpov chose the French defense and held on to draw and won the match. The score, like Kasparov's, was 1½-½. Fritz ended in fifth place overall.
In the same year, playing in Baden, Switzerland, Fritz drew its games against Victor Kortchnoi and Women's World Champion Zsuzsa Polgar. In a Bled tournament, playing against the Slowenian Olympiad team, Fritz scored 8:2, with an Elo performance of 2727. It was slowly climbing the ladder of computer excellence.
In May 1996 Fritz participated in the Eighth World Computer Chess Championship, staged in Chinese University of Hong Kong. There it played a memorable game against a prototype of IBM's Deep Blue – and won.
In the end Fritz, running on a 90 MHz Pentium, was the winner of the Eighth World Computer Chess Championship, open not just for micros, but for all computers, including giant mainframes.
Here's the decisive game against Deep Blue:
And on it went:
In 1999, a Fritz DVD was sent up to the Russian space station “MIR”, where the cosmonauts could play against it. Fritz burnt up with MIR station when it was de-orbited two years later.
In November 2003 Garry Kasparov played a very special match against Fritz in New York. This will be the subject of our next Fritz birthday article
