Garry Kasparov

There's nothing like taking your family on a camping trip -- getting away from civilization, sleeping under the open sky, looking up into the heavens and gazing upon an awe-inspiring vista of millions and millions of ... what are those things? Bats? Very large mosquitoes? Oh NO! They've taken little Ashley! So perhaps it's better not to sleep under the open sky. But you should still go camping, because it's the best way to get close to nature, with "nature" defined as "anything you would kill if it got in your house."

CONSIDERING the O's share of what baseball owes for its collusionary behavior (about $11 million), think Eli "Cut Rate" Jacobs is having any second thoughts about not jacking up ticket prices?* "Denny the Detonator," the name given to the Blast's mascot, ranks right up there with the worst in American sports.* Talk about bad moves, Anatoly Karpov's end moves of Qg2, Rxa1, Nf4 in his latest draw with Garry Kasparov are easily as bad as Joe Tipton for Nellie Fox.* You have to wonder what kind of computer Jeff Sagarin is using in his college football ratings for USA Today when top-ranked Notre Dame, supposedly playing the toughest schedule in the land, ends up No. 17 this week.

NEW YORK - Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art, and they will say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport, and the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess might be just a very complex math problem, and there is immediate resistance. The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked player and the former world champion, will play a $1 million, six-game match here against a chess program called Deep Junior. It will be the fourth time that Kasparov has matched wits against a computer and the first time since he lost a similar match in 1997 to Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. Recently, Vladimir Kramnik, Kasparov's former protege and the current world champion, tied an eight-game match against another chess-playing program called Deep Fritz.

NEW YORK: The thing to remember about chess is that it's not professional wrestling.I try to keep this in mind as I'm sitting 107 stories above God's green earth, or at least above New York City, on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, watching bad-boy Garry Kasparov hunch over chess pieces. He is defending his world championship against Viswanathan Anand, known in the chess world as "Vishy."The first thing that strikes me is that I'm at a world-class sporting event and nobody is tuning up with "We will, we will rock you."

NEW YORK -- Now that Deep Blue has bested mankind's chess champion, it may be time to revisit another far-fetched vision of the computer age: digital diagnosis. After all, if one machine's logic can muscle through 200 million chess moves a second to win a uniquely human game, why shouldn't another harness the power to synthesize signs and symptoms of disease?Computer-based diagnostic systems have been in development for more than 20 years. Not unlike mechanics' car-engine diagnostic systems, these programs typically incorporate artificial intelligence, or ''expert judgment,'' and one or more algorithms to come up with an assessment of clinical signs and symptoms leading to a list of diagnoses.

MOSCOW -- The bitter controversy over the murder two weeks ago of investigative reporter Dmitry Kholodov has refused to die down, and step by step the government has had to back away from its insistence that his accusations of corruption in the army are groundless.Yesterday, President Boris N. Yeltsin fired Gen. Matvei Burlakov, the deputy defense minister who had been the murdered journalist's main target, declaring in a decree that he was acting "to protect the honor of the Russian armed forces."

It was a daunting task, but the more ambitious of the challengers could at least try to take some comfort in the odds: With 60 players arrayed against one former world chess champion, wasn't there the chance that someone among them could pull off an upset? Those kind of thoughts were quickly dispelled for most of the elementary and high school students who turned out last night to try their luck against Russian legend Anatoly Karpov in a "simultaneous" game at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

WHEN WORLD chess champion Garry Kasparov met his silicon nemesis Deep Blue, the question was asked: Are we as a species threatened if a computer can defeat the best human chess player in the world?This is the wrong question. The experiment of matching human versus machine teaches us how wonderfully unique we are. The question to ask is, why was it so difficult for the computer to beat Mr. Kasparov?Every second the computer examines 200 million positions while Mr. Kasparov looks at no more than 10. Preprogrammed into the computer is an enormous data base containing millions of moves and positions.

THE AMERICAN MEDIA have not yet found a home for chess news. They heralded the 1972 and 1992 victories of Bobby Fischer over Boris Spassky in feature news articles. They print weekly chess columns in the leisure sections of newspapers. They also run an occasional human-interest story about chess, often accompanied by a cute photo of young children playing the royal game. But they have not yet accepted chess as a competitive sport. Nevertheless, chess is a sport and deserves regular coverage in the sports pages.

IBM Corp. has won a government contract to build two supercomputers whose speed, company officials say, could for the first time approach the theoretical raw processing power of the human brain. The $290 million contract between IBM and the Department of Energy was expected to be made public today at Supercomputing 2002, the annual high-performance computing conference being held this week in downtown Baltimore. Fast and even faster The first machine, dubbed ASCI Purple, will be capable of performing 100 trillion calculations per second when it's delivered in 2004, the company said.