Get ready for a man versus machine match with a twist this week: ICC’s Deep Junior 11 (running on a home-desktop Dell Vostro 200, with Intel core duo E8200 processor, 2.66MHz, 3GB RAM) gets set to face a combined challenge from GM Miguel Illescas and Junior 10 (running on a Toshiba laptop A-100, with 2GHz T7200 processor, 1GB RAM) on Thursday, June 5th (starting at 12:00pm EDT – 18:00pm CET) at CosmoCaixa in Barcelona, Spain.

Miguel Illescas is a seven-time Spanish champion and second to former world champion Vladimir Kramnik. And his relationship with computers is a crucial one – he was hired as a consultant by IBM for Deep Blue, the machine that beat Kasparov in 1997.

Deep Junior 11 is a new version of the five-time world computer chess champion program, created by Israelis Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, that also drew a six-game match in 2003 in New York against Kasparov.

The two-game rapid (20m + 10sec) match-up will pose some interesting questions: Apart from the brute calculating force, how much more does this prototype version of Deep Junior 11 really understand the game? And more importantly, at what point will the human intervention of one of the world’s top grandmasters influence this intriguing duel?

ICC will be following this match-up live with Chess.FM in Spanish and English from the playing venue. For further information go to http://www.chessclub.com/finger/Junior08 Other links: http://www.edami.com/home03.aspx?ID=151 and http://www.edami.com/download/CosmoCaixa_05-06-08_cas.pdf

ICC now has the exclusive rights to new versions of Junior (both Deep Junior 11 and Junior 11), and soon after the match it will be commercially available from the ICC.

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Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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