Chess Champ `Mates Computer

NEW YORK--It was a battle of world chess champions--human vs. computer--and the mind proved mightier than the microchip. For now.

The world champion, 26-year-old Garri Kasparov, coasted to two victories Sunday over Deep Thought, a chess-playing computer that can analyze more than 700,000 moves a second.

Kasparov said at first he missed the psychological tension and energy of a human opponent. But then he "felt a burst of energy from the audience wanting me to really crush the computer. Because we all have something in common--we are all human beings."

The champion said computers are moving in the right direction, and predicted machines will be able to beat strong grandmasters in two or three years.

"I'm very happy I could do in both games what I wanted," said Kasparov, who hasn't lost a tournament since 1981. "In the first game, with black, I played quietly. In the second game, I tried to crush it in the opening."

The 1989 World Computer Chess champion retired from the first game after Kasparov's 52nd move.

Playing white in the second game, Kasparov took Deep Thought's queen in move 18. The computer hung on for 19 more moves before resigning.

The champion noted that the computer kept playing long after a flesh-and-blood opponent would have resigned.

"I think the computer needs to be taught something--how to resign," he said.

The computer didn't travel for the match; it remained in Pittsburgh with a telephone line to relay its moves to a computer terminal in New York, where someone moved the chess pieces.

Deep Thought, created by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, can search 700,000 positions per second and analyze from five to 20 upcoming moves by each side as well as each move's implications.

Last November, Deep Thought beat the world's 96th ranked player, Denmark's Bent Larsen--the first time a computer had defeated a grandmaster in tournament play.

The resident of Baku, USSR, became a grandmaster in 1979 and won the world championship in 1985.

He said he realized early in the first game that he would win when the computer missed some tactical opportunities and was unable to analyze all of the champion's decisions.

In the second game, Kasparov explained he wanted to create a new opening that the computer wouldn't be able to break down.

Kasparov said that the computer was "fully aggressive" but that its "mind was too straight and too primitive."