KASPAROV SAYS HE WAS CHEATED IN DUEL WITH IBM COMPUTER

ZAGREB, Aug 15 (Hina) - World chess champion Gary Kasparov said on Thursday that his duel with the powerful IBM chess machine Deep Blue was a scam. Speaking at a two-hour press conference at the Hotel Meteor in the southern Croatian Adriatic resort of Makarska, Kasparov said that four chess grand masters Illescas, Benjamin, De Firmian and Fedorovich had interfered in the game which took place in New York in May. He used a demonstration board to show how he had been cheated and how he had lost 3.5 to 2.5 to the machine which can calculate 200 million positions in one second. Kasparov said that every now and then the computer would change his electronic logic and that sometimes it had taken it 13 minutes to make a move, almost four times more than the programmed time of three minutes. "The machine was fantastic in tactical positions. (…) However, in the second game, after the usual start, in several critical moments when the game was breaking, the machine was thinking for 13 minutes and made moves which were not in accordance with the logic of a machine but with the logic of very strong grand masters who know what a position game is." "The crucial move was Le4 in the second game, when I definitively realised that I was not dealing with a chess programme but with people occasionally influencing the choice of moves." As a special point of interest, Kasparov stressed that IBM shares on world stock exchanges had increased by as much as 10 billion dollars in two weeks after the New York duel. "It was not a duel according to sporting principles, it was not a scientific experiment but a fraud." He said that not even three months after the match, IBM did not send him a promised printout of the whole game. "If someone sets a world record, then they have to undergo antidoping tests before the result is verified. "For a machine, the antidoping test is a game printout. It must be seen whether the machine has been playing on its own or whether there has been interference." Kasparov said he expected a new match "under real, sportsmanlike conditions." (hina) vm 151225 MET aug 97