NEW YORK (AP) — It was advantage no one after Game 3 of world chess champion Garry Kasparov’s match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer, as man and machine played to a draw. Tuesday’s stalemate left their series tied at one win each.
Kasparov offered the computer a draw after making his 48th move. Deep Blue immediately accepted, ending the 4 1/2-hour match.
The 34-year-old Russian defeated Deep Blue in Saturday’s opening game of the series, when the computer resigned after Kasparov’s 45th move. On Sunday, Kasparov resigned after the computer’s 45th move, though a subsequent review of the game showed he could have continued to play for a draw.
Kasparov easily defeated the computer in a similar match last year, but IBM technicians say it is a better player now.
Kasparov played white on Tuesday, giving him the slight advantage of making the first move. He opened in the same cautious manner as he began the first two games, playing a slow-developing series of moves in which his offensive intentions were not immediately clear.
He and Deep Blue jockeyed for position for 17 moves before finally exchanging pawns on the 18th move.
On its 25th move, Deep Blue initiated an exchange of queens, which began a long endgame that ultimately ended in stalemate.
Kasparov has said that barring human error, a person will always be better than a machine at chess. But IBM technicians say they have improved Deep Blue since last year’s match and the machine can now examine twice as many positions per second, 200 million.
In their first match in Philadelphia in February 1996, Deep Blue easily beat Kasparov in the first game, but the champion rallied to win the second, fifth and sixth and take the match. Man and machine played to a draw in the third and fourth games.
Several hundred people paid $25 each to watch a video feed of Tuesday’s contest in a first-floor auditorium at the Equitable Center, a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. The game was played on the building’s 35th floor.
Game 4 of the match is scheduled for Wednesday, with Games 5 and 6 to be played on Saturday and Sunday. The winner takes home $700,000 of a $1.1 million purse.