Fact Sheet (Source: FIDE.com)
TITLE: The Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge
EVENT: President’s Cup Computer vs. Computer
SPONSOR: President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
PRESENTER: Federation Internationale des Echecs (FIDE)
SANCTIONED BY: Federation Internationale des Echecs (FIDE) President: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov International Computer Games Association (ICGA) President: David Levy
PLAYERS: Deep Junior vs. Deep Fritz The reigning World Computer Champion vs. The winner against the world human champion
VENUE: Goverment House, Elista, Republic of Kalmykia.
DATES: Tuesday, June 5h – Tuesday 12th June 2007
FORMAT: Rapid Chess 75 min for the game + 5 sec per move
SCHEDULE: Wed June 6th Game 1
Thu June 7th Game 2
Fri June 8th Game 3
Sat June 9th Game 4
Sun June 10th Game 5
Mon June 11th Game 6
Tue June 12th Tiebreak (if required)
STARTING TIME: 11:30 a.m.
CEREMONIES: Tue 5th June Press Conference & Opening Ceremony – Elista
Tue 12th June Closing Ceremony & Prize Giving – Elista
PRIZE FUND: US $100,000 ($60,000 to the winner, $40,000 to the loser)
ARBITER: IM David Levy
REGULATIONS: FIDE laws of chess, ICGA official computer chess rules
CONTACTS
Honorary FIDE Vice President: Israel Gelfer Email: gelfer@fide.com
FIDE President assistant: Berik Balgabaev Email: fide@inbox.ru
DEEP FRITZ interviews: Frederic Friedel Email: info@chessbase.com
DEEP JUNIOR interviews: Shay Bushinsky Email: shay@cs.haifa.ac.il
Tal vs Capablanca
The Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge pits two of the world’s strongest and most exciting programs in a six-game battle against each other. The event takes place during the final stages of the Candidates Matches for the World Championship (human), which will be held from May 26 to June 14, 2007 in Elista, Kalmykia.
Deep Junior
This chess program, written by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky of Israel, is the reigning World Champion in computer chess. Junior won the title during the Chess Olympiad in Turin last year, ahead of the programs Shredder, Rybka and Zappa (which was running on a 512 processor super-computer calculating 100 million nodes per second). It was Junior’s fifth world championship title in this millennium.
Deep Junior is a program that is capable of producing very deep computations to outwit the opponent. It is also well known for its unique handling of “compensation”. Junior is willing, like no other program, to sacrifice material for initiative, activity or a promising attack. This causes it to come up with highly unexpected, imaginative ideas. Chess players appreciate the “wild” side of Junior’s personality and use the program to find new ideas in their chess analysis. Junior is generally regarded as the Mikhail Tal of computer chess.
Junior showed its unique quality of play in 2003 by producing a stunning move in its match against 13th World Champion Garry Kasparov. From a quiet opening in a standard-looking position, the program, on move ten, sacrificed a bishop out of a clear blue sky to drag Kasparov’s king out into the open. Attacking with only a queen and knight, Junior put the white king under heavy fire. The game as well as the six-game match ended in a draw.
Deep Fritz
Deep Fritz, written by Frans Morsch of Holland and Mathias Feist of Germany, dominated the computer rating lists for almost a decade. Just over two years ago the authors decided to rewrite the program. Instead of further optimizing it for speed they started implementing large amounts of chess knowledge, derived from centuries of research by human chess masters. This allows Fritz to find constructive ideas even in situations where there are no tactical motifs to guide the course of the game.
The advantage of this strategy is that the program becomes much better at playing against human beings, and also turns it into an extremely well-balanced analysis partner. This is greatly appreciated by chess professionals who consider Fritz the “voice of reason”. Fritz is often compared to the great Cuban world champion Capablanca for its playing style.
In November 2006 Deep Fritz played a six-game match against reigning World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in Bonn, Germany. In the final round Fritz played one of the finest games ever seen by a computer, displaying great strategic understanding and inventiveness, to win the game and take the match 4:2. An earlier match between Kramnik and Deep Fritz, 2002 in Bahrain, had ended in a 4:4 score.
The Clash of Systems
The Elista match is a chance to see how these two great computer rivals with their different strategies and styles of play fares against each other. Will Fritz’s knowledge-based approach detract from its computational speed and allow it to fall prey to Junior’s tactical ferocity and imaginative play? Will Junior see compensation where not enough exists and succumb to Fritz’s ruthless strategic precision? In any case this will be an exciting experiment.
I will be watching these games. But everyone claims that Rybka is the strongest program.
Not sure why FIDE is putting up the prize money. Maybe Kirsan is done with people and he figures he will be better off supporting computers.
The $100k is kinda strange until one remembers that Chessbase publishes both programs.
And that makes it down right weird.
What are the rules for computer matches?
What are the specification of hardwares?
I think Junior should get the same kind of advantages against Fritz that kramnik got.
Is just moving money from one pocket to the other.
This is just publicity for Chessbase, with Kirsan like the Don King of Chess (que te largues pinche cabron de una buena vez!).
I bet that will be a draw match.
They dont wanna face a real challenge, let say Shredder, maybe Hydra or the greatest: Rybka.
I tested myself, many times, differents versions of Junior and Fritz, and Rybka crushed both Chessbase products.
But, u dont have to believe in my words, try it yourself, check the rankings of computer engines (and the games related).
“The truth will set us free”. 🙂
Computers all the time are cheating ( Fide Rules ), Computers “read” an openning book, move the pieces ( virtually ) and make 10000… copies of the board.
Indeed, a quadruple round-robin or so tournament with Fritz, Junior, Shredder and Rybka would be much more interesting than this Chessbase commercial event…
The newest version of Rybka is rated higher than either Junior or Fritz. Nevertheless, these are monster chess programs and I don’t think any human GM could defeat either of them in a match unless you allow the person to have several advantages.
It would be interesting to see a match between the top computer chess program and, say, the top three human GM’s working as a team (if they could get along with each other).
It’s quite difficult for even the strongest GM to obtain a draw against these programs. It’s inevitable.
In another post on this blog, it was pointed out that GM Karpov was watching GM Anand play a complex variation of the Sicilian. Karpov commented to someone what he thought the best move was but also said that he didn’t think Anand would make that move “because Fritz wouldn’t…”
I think this comment from Karpov says a lot. People are learning a great deal from computers that people like Morphy, Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, etc could never have imagined.
I’m not a strong enough chess player to see “deep enough” into a super-GM’s games to know if humans are beginning to play more like computers would or not….but I’m sure they all have copies of these programs and use them to train, evaluate, analyze, etc.
It’s interesting…for those interesting in the game of checkers…the reigning world checker champion Alex Moiseyev…can no longer even draw against the best computer checker programs. For those interested,
the American Checker Foundation’s website is:
http://usacheckers.com/index.php
Computers have surpassed the best human players. Yet, it doesn’t bother me. I play because I love chess.
I sometimes wonder…in 200 years how much stronger will human chess players be than our generation’s best? How much will they have progressed due to computers?
We’ll never know but the fact that computers are better than the best human players should never detract someone from playing chess.
What a joke. This is blatant commercialism. The idea that either of these two programs is the best is patently absurd.
Of course, Chessbase would never agree to a Rybka-Fritz match with this kind of publicity, because they would be exposed.
Hmmm… Junior and Fritz….
OK, they are very strong. But why not let the REALLY strong programs play?!?! where’s Rybka?!?
The funny thing is that Fritz and Junior are not even the best chess engines that Chessbase markets, the new Zap engine is better than either of them and of course (non-Chessbase) Rybka is better than them all.
Anyone who plays on Playchess as often as I do will tell you that everything that is not Rybka or Zap on 8-core goes to pieces immediately.