28th January, 2003

WORLD No.1 Garry Kasparov went a long way towards finally exorcising the
ghost of his defeat at the hands of IBM's Deep Blue, as he sensationally
crushed the three-time World Chess Computer champion Deep Junior in just
27 moves in the opening game of the FIDE Man vs. Machine World
Championship challenge in New York.

Despite the ease of his victory, Kasparov, who valuates Deep Junior to
being stronger than Deep Blue, is still taking nothing for granted in
the six-game $1 million match taking place at the New York Athletic
Club. "I don't want this to be a mirror image of the last match when I
won the first game and lost the second game," Kasparov said after the
win, referring to his historic 1997 encounter with IBM's Deep Blue where
eventually the strain got to Kasparov.

And stamina while playing a computer may be the deciding factor in this
match. In October last year, Vladimir Kramnik, the player who snatched
Kasparov's world crown, took on rival program Deep Fritz in a similar $1
million match in Bahrain. After effortlessly moving into a 3-0 lead,
the current world champion drew the match most thought he would easily
win as the strain of continually having to find the most accurate move
against the computer took its toll.

The word "Deep" in front of the names of the programs means they run on
parallel processors. Deep Junior calculates roughly three million moves
per second, compared to Deep Blue's 200-300 million, but Junior is far
more flexible in its decision-making and understands more abstract
concepts than its IBM counterpart.

However, in the first game the only thing "Deep" about the
Israeli-designed program was the trouble it got itself into from very
early in the opening. Perhaps surprised by Kasparov eschewing the
cautious "anti-computer" strategy that led to his downfall six years
ago, Deep Junior soon found itself being crushed by the world No.1's
trademark aggressive style at the board, as he adopted one of the most
dangerous lines -- the Shabalov Variation -- in the Semi-Slav. The
programmers may now have to do some early repair work on the computers
opening book -- instead of 9 ..e5, safer is the line with 9 ..Bb7.

G Kasparov - DEEP JUNIOR
FIDE Man-Machine, (1)
Semi-Slav Defence
1 d4 d5 2 c4 c6 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 e3 e6 5 Nf3 Nbd7 6 Qc2 Bd6 7 g4 dxc4 8 Bxc4
b6 9 e4 e5 10 g5 Nh5 11 Be3 0-0 12 0-0-0 Qc7 13 d5 b5 14 dxc6 bxc4 15
Nb5 Qxc6 16 Nxd6 Bb7 17 Qc3 Rae8 18 Nxe8 Rxe8 19 Rhe1 Qb5 20 Nd2 Rc8 21
Kb1 Nf8 22 Ka1 Ng6 23 Rc1 Ba6 24 b3 cxb3 25 Qxb3 Ra8 26 Qxb5 Bxb5 27 Rc7
1-0

JOHN B HENDERSON, Press Officer