Advanced Chess is a new form of chess in which humans and computers join forces and compete as a team against each other. It represents a high-tech approach to the game and increases the level of play to heights never before seen in chess. It also gives the viewing public a unique insight into the thought processes of chess playing humans and computers.

Advanced Chess was conceived and introduced into the international tournament circuit by Garry Kasparov, who played the first public match (against Veselin Topalov) in June 1998. The match was organised by Marcelino Sion in the city of Léon, Spain. Since then Léon has hosted three more Advanced Chess events, all three of which were won by Vishwanathan Anand.

Background

Chess is a game played by two entities on the planet: man and the digital computer. Initially humans completely outclassed the machines, but in recent years computers have made dramatic progress in playing strength. Today a standard PC with a disk-based program is able to beat 99.999% of all human chessplayers. For the latter it is comforting to note that the remaining 0.001% of top-notch players still represent an almost insurmountable obstacle to total dominance of computers in chess.

Strength of the computer

Computers calculate at prodigious speeds. On a fast PC the strongest chess programs will generate and evaluate about 1,000,000 or more positions per seconds. In tactically complex positions they are superior to any human player. In the opening they can access unlimited knowledge from disk – tens of millions of tried and tested moves. In the endgame they use hash tables to search very deeply, and in certain restricted endings (with just five pieces on the board) they in fact possess total information and play absolutely perfect chess.

Human strength

Human masters look at only a very limited number of positions, compared to a computer. But they are able to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant, look at meaningful moves instead of every nonsensical variation. Humans are able to judge the quality of a move in very long-term categories, formulate plans that go a long way beyond the horizons of even the fastest computers. If a human chessmaster can survive the tactical onslaught of the machine, his strategical superiority will triumph.

Man vs Machine

The former world champion Garry Kasparov has pioneered a number of Man vs Machine events. In the strongest blitz tournament of all times he was the only player to narrowly beat the participating computer. In 25-minute chess he has maintained a positive score (after losing an initial match) against computers. In a regulation-speed tournament match with an average of three minutes per move, he beat the IBM research computer Deep Blue in February 1996 and was defeated in a return match in May 1997. The IBM machine ran at 200 million positions per second and cost about $20 million to develop.

Effect of computers on human players

Because of their playing strength and general availability computers have a profound influence on chess players of all categories. Computers are used to practise and train, to develop new opening plans, analyse complex positions, solve difficult endings. Owning a PC today is like having a grandmaster at your permanent disposal.

Computers have also changed the way serious chess tournament are conducted. Any contact between players and their electronic helpers must be prevented during the game. The tradition of interrupting long games and completing them a day or some days later, had to be abandoned as it became possible to exhaustively analyse the position with the help of computers. In correspondence chess where the players work on their moves for many days in the privacy of their homes, computers are used extensively – although most correspondence players will not admit to this.

The symbiosis: man and machine

The game of Advanced Chess makes a virtue out of the reality of chess playing computers. Each human player is equipped with a PC, which he can consult at will during the game. The rate of play is one hour for all the moves, so that the player must be careful to allocate his time well. He enters variations for the computer to analyse, but also spends time pondering the position himself, while the computer is checking the crucial variations. The human is always in charge and has the final decision on which move to make.

In a tournament all players have identical hardware – the latest and fastest PCs – which they can use to help select the moves. They use the computers in different ways in three phases of the game:

1. In the opening they will consult a giant database of almost two million games to check whether the moves of the opponent have been played before and with what success.

2. In the middlegame the players use the calculating powers of Fritz to check the feasibility of their plans. Typically a player will execute a sequence of moves he would like to play on the PC and then make the program do a tactical search to see whether there are any "holes" in the variation. He may try a second or third sequence and compare their merits.

3. In the endgame the players may search for positions for which the computer has full information, checking whether a winning position can be reached.

Displaying the thinking process

A very attractive feature of Advanced Chess is that for the first time the public is able to directly observe how top Grandmasters find their moves. The monitor displays of both players are projected on large screens, so that the audience can follow every action of the player. In the analysis room a chess commentator will have a third computer – with the same program as the players – on which he can explain exactly why certain lines were rejected by the players.

Strength of the Advanced Chess player

It is important to note that the human-computer team is stronger than each of its components. A top Grandmaster may be stronger than the computer program he is using, but he is able to increases his playing strength even further when assisted by the program. Experts have estimated that the best man-computer teams are able to achieve a performance rating of 3000 on the Elo scale (the world's strongest players are just around 2800).

Advanced Chess on the Internet

The man-computer concept of Advanced Chess ties in very nicely with chess game servers that are becoming popular on the Internet. Most online games cannot be monitored for fairness. It is clear that a large number of players surreptitiously consult databases and chess playing computers during their games.

The answer to the dilemma is to legalise the use of computers – at least in certain tournaments. The Internet is the perfect site for an Advanced Chess tournament circuit, in which anyone can participate. For the first time even the weakest of players can enter a tournament without fear of disgrace. At worst they will simply follow the computer on every move. Naturally, a stronger player with the same hardware who actually uses it constructively (as described above) will be superior, but the games against the novice will still be very exciting and of a very high quality.

A strong grandmaster who understands how to use the computer well will dominate the opposition and win most of the tournaments he enters. But it will quite meaningful for amateurs to play against him, and they will actually win occasional games. Most importantly the amateur will sense the spirit of competition and learn a lot about the game in the process.

Frederic Friedel