Chess, 3D Sunglasses to See Kasparov at New York

As most Americans huddled around the television Sunday to watch the annual clash of the nation's two strongest football teams, 400 chess fans at the New York Athletic Clubwere glued to a man-versus-machine showdown that many seemed to feel was more profound. The first game of a six-game match between Garry Kasparov, the world's leading chess player.Attendees, who received free tickets by signing up on the Web site of the tournament's sponsor, X3D Technologies Corp., stared attentively at a screen that, for nearly four hours, showed only a chessboard and occasionally the back of Kasparov's head as carbon faced silicon in isolation on another floor. Many wore black sunglasses provided by X3D that gave the slightly hallucinogenic effect of seeing the pieces floating in 3-D space.

In 1997, Kasparov lost a highly publicized battle against Deep Blue, a computer IBM built to beat him. Kasparov was widely regarded as having failed to play his best, but the company declined his request for a rematch. The two Israeli programmers who designed Deep Junior, Amir and Shay Bushinsky, say that instead of relying on sheer calculation power, their program incorporates artificial intelligence that gives it more humanlike judgment. The program has not lost to a human in two years.