Commentary for black move 17:

GK MOVE: 17 Nxd4.

MAURICE ASHLEY: One moment, we'll get back to your question but Kasparov has in fact played the very natural capture Nxd4.

DB MOVE: 17...000

MAURICE ASHLEY: Deep Blue has responded instantly by castling -- it has castled queen-side. And that's not something we anticipated, and usually, Yaz, castling queen-side Means if you go the other way, I'm looking to hurt you! (Audience laughter.)

YASSER SEIRAWAN: One of the most exciting middle game positions you can have is with castles on opposite sides of the board because then both guys -- both players, rather, usually go full throttle at one another's king. And again, a youngster, please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm not an expert at timed chess or anything, /KPWUT what happened if the time runs out before he completes his 40 moves?

YASSER SEIRAWAN: You lose! (Audience laughter.) The question is, if you don't make your 40 moves in two hours, what happens? And I said, "You lose." That's exactly what happens.

MAURICE ASHLEY: Before we take another question I'd like to reintroduce onto the stage International Master Mike Valvo. I will take my leave, and I'm sure, Mike, we have a lot to update the audience on.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: International Master Maurice Ashley. Thank you, Maurice. Mike, take the hot seat and bring us up to date. What's going on in the computer scientist world?

MIKE VALVO: Well, I hear -- "hear" -- that the IBM people were quite surprised when h5 was played! (Audience laughter.)

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing?

MIKE VALVO: Well, they started rationalizeing it after a while.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: So it was a bad thing! (Audience laughter.)

MIKE VALVO: Some were trying to explain why they thought it might be good. But, for the most part, I think that to say it was a surprise to them is saying say lot. There's other comments that looks like the computer is playing like a computer again, is some of the comments that were being made. I don't think we can have any umbrage with that particular comment. It's playing like a computer.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Guess why! Because it's a computer! It's that simple.

MIKE VALVO: Well, there are stories out of Garry's camp that wonder if it's really some kind of cyber net I can machine, half man, half computer. You know, there's enough room in that box, that RS/6000 -- (Audience laughter.) It might just be!

YASSER SEIRAWAN: That's true. It would still be a little bit uncomfortable.

MIKE VALVO: If I were Garry, I'd make them open it up.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: I want to see that circuitry work? That's right --! That's right. In any case this, h5 came as a surprise. How about the Bb4+? We were analyzing that too.

MIKE VALVO: Grandmaster Arthur Bisguire, who was champion of the United States, even before I was born -- well, not really -- he said that the only explanation for Bb4+ in his opinion is if black intend to do play h5. Well, I thought about that. I didn't quite understand it, but that was his comment.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: That the two moves seemed to go hand in hand?

MIKE VALVO: Yeah, hand in glove. He would have play Bc5 like you were recommending originally.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Exactly. Any feelings in the press room one way or another as to how Garry's position is? I personally favor Garry's position? Even Fritz, just looking at the toolbar, you see a lot of green. So even Fritz has liked Garry's position for a few moves.

MIKE VALVO: Yeah, everybody seems to like Garry's position. Thoughts varying from it's technical at this point to white's just better, it's an opening position, gives the bishops more scope, those kinds of comments. I think everybody expects that white's doing quite well here.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: We have a lot of questions from the audience. We'll take one also over here in the center. Pass the microphone, please. I think we're going to be introducing a guest, soon, so we'll take his question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. Could you analyze this position for us? I don't know why they're saying that white is better.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Okay, the question is, please bring us up to date on the position. I'll do that. First I'll introduce a guest. Matt tennis.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Matt is the person who is most responsible for bringing Deep Blue, setting Deep Blue up, protecting Deep Blue from the various power surges, and when things go wrong this, guy is in a lot of trouble.

MIKE VALVO: He's the official sweater. Not the kind you wear.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: I'm going to address the gentleman's question as to what's going on in the position, but one of the things I want to ask you because I know it happened, Deep Blue crashed during the game. And what exactly happened at that time that moment and how is your heart?

Matt: Well, I wouldn't use the word crashed. I'd say maybe /SPOPD responding. (Audience laughter.)

MATT THOENNES: At the point we notice that it stops thinking, we can restart the program and the program will pick up where it was and go back into looking at what moves it was looking at at that time.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: But let's be clear. When Garry Kasparov is thinking as he's thinking now, Deep Blue is thinking, and it's storing a lot of information --

MATT THOENNES: Yes. YASSER SEIRAWAN: When you turn off or restart, the computer will have lost that information that it had gained?

MATT THOENNES: Well, I mean you can say, it loses some of the history, some of the state that it has, but it can pick up, you know, the last positions and basically reload where it is, and we may take a little bit more time to make the next move, but it's not like, you know, going back to the beginning of the game and working our way all the way through it.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Okay, we're going to take some questions for Matt in a moment. First of all I just want to address what's going on in the position. Why do we like Garry Kasparov's position, why is he better, isn't black got a good game? Several things that are going on. First of all, black's knights. Knight on f6 and knight O G 6. To be good, knights need to be posted in the center of the board, and they need to be posted on support squares so that it can leap into the battle, and that they're protected. This knight on g6 has got a problem leaping into the battle. The square e5 is not protected by a pawn, it's protected a a queen. This knight is going to have to leap into the battle to become active. So at the moment we can say that black is going to have to activate those knights to maintain the balance of the game. The second thing we can say is this bishop on g2 that has no counterpart is operating on a massively wonderful diagonal. So let's take a look at what is Garry thinking. Garry has two ideas. One idea is to play the move Bc1-e3 and to bring his king to the queen-side in the same way that Deep Blue has done. We might see, for example, a move like Nf6-g4. R Garry could contemplate a move like Bg2-h3, pinning the knight, or he can allow, after castles, Nxe3 Qxe3. In this moment a fairly balanced position because after the move Be7-c5, not too much of an advantage has taken place in this variation. So a more likely variation is that Garry will post his king on the king-side. However, this also isn't complete safety. After the move 00, again, here we see possible sacrifices. Let's imagine that after Nf6-g4, this queen on c7 can /SPAOP down here on h2, checkmate, so black is setting up the possibility of Ng6xh4. One more look. After the move 00, what white would like to achieve is to sweep his bishops towards black's king. He would ideally love to put this bishop on c1 to the f4 square, where it would gain a tempo, attack black's queen and face the queen-side. Another idea is for white to put the bishop on e3 so it will attack the a7 pawn. I think after 00 Ng4, we may see a move like Nf5, attacking the bishop on e7, protecting the f4 pawn. We see the move Bxh4, there's a trick. Nxh4 Nxh4 Bf4, attacking the queen on c7, and the next move will be g3xh4. Do we have a move by Garry yet?

MATT THOENNES: No, he's still thinking.

MIKE VALVO: But he is casting his shadow over the board, you can see up there.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Also, one other problem that Deep Blue has. When you castle queen-side, the king on c8 is still one square closer to the center. When white castles king-side, his king on g1 will be one square further away from the center. It's very common after castling queen-side that black will need to waste the tempo Kc8-b8. In the position that Garry is thinking, Garry can consider the move Bg2-h3+, forcing immediately -- immediately forcing Kc8-b8. So right now, overall, it's tough to get a full impression, but black's king is a little bit more vulnerable. White has the two bishops, long-term advantage. The knight on d4 can jump to f5. The bishop on c1 can jump to f4. At this moment, let's take advantage of Matt's presence so that he can answer some questions and quickly get back to his --

MATT THOENNES: Well, actually before we even get to that we want to try something a little bit different. Things have been going so well upstairs that finally this morning they let me out for a walk. So I decided to take a friend with me and if we can make it correct, I think we can show a videotape up here.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: What have we got here, Matt?

MATT THOENNES: Well, you'll see it in a moment. We took it down to Rockefeller center, the mock up we have on the stage to visit the "Today" show.

MIKE VALVO: Hey, Matt, there you are?

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