Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Harvard Cup Man-versus-Machine Chess Challenge

1993; International Computer Games Association; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3233/icg-1993-16113

2468-2438

Christopher F. Chabris,

Digital Games and Media

In the summer of 1989 Dan Edelman, a FIDE Master and then president of the Harvard University Chess Club, was planning a visit by World Champion Garry Kasparov to the college.Kasparov would be traveling to Cambridge from New York, where he was scheduled to play the subsequently famous two-game match against Deep Thought.I was helping Dan to organize the visit, and we wanted to stage a man-against-machine confrontation that would be different from the head-on match format but also intriguing for the public and the press.We were unaware of the AEGON tournaments at the time (that event was just evolving into its mature state), but we decided to adopt a similar formula: to pit teams of four computers and four American grandmasters against each other in the Scheveningen format.Each human would play each computer once, but no humans or computers would play each other.After a lot of last-minute faxing and telephoning the Harvard Chess Festival was set to begin.Kasparov arrived in the afternoon of Friday, 27 October 1989, spoke at the Russian Research Center, and on the next day shut out eight opponents (seven humans plus the Sargon IV program) in one of his trademark clock simultaneous displays before an audience of about 800.That evening he analyzed some positions with Deep Thought at a party in his honor, and at noon on Sunday the 29 th he came to Harvard's Memorial Hall, built to honor the university's Civil War dead, to open officially what we had dubbed the First Harvard Cup.In brief remarks he predicted victory for the grandmasters, but warned that he was always ready to defend humanity if necessary.As it turned out he was not needed that day: the human team, consisting of GMs Lev Alburt, Maxim Dlugy, Boris Gulko, and Michael Rohde won by a score of 14.5-1.5 against Chiptest, Deep Thought, Hitech, and Mephisto's Portorose (a unit with a Motorola 68020 processor running at 12 MHz).