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I regretted a lot not being able to watch it, but apparently they also did great broadcasting the Kasparov/X3D Fritz chess match late last year:

http://www.x3dchess.com/

There are approximately 35 moves per position in Chess (average value). Thus, the branching factor of the search tree is ~35 with a simple min-max search. Assuming that the program is always picking the best move to search first -- which is obviously not systematically the case -- alpha-beta pruning allows us to get a branching factor equal to approximately the square root of 35, that is: close to 6.

Assuming that 2070 CPU are able to do the calculations 2070 times faster than 1 CPU -- which, again, is not the case -- it appears that the resulting supernode is able to 'see' up to 4 or 5 half-moves deeper than a single CPU in the same amount of time:

6^4 < 2070 < 6^5

It doesn't seem to be *that* useful. For most strategical positions, thinking 5 half-moves deeper just doesn't make any difference. Game 3 of 'Kasparov vs X3D Fritz' is a good example: I'd be willing to bet that 2070 X3D Fritz playing together would have lost the game the same way, since the serious troubles caused by the pawns diagonal are still far beyond the resulting analysis depth. (Well... At least, I think so. I'm not a Chess expert!)

Anyway, this is quite an interesting project. I hope to see it grow up in the future.

-- Arnauld

even though the technology has advanced significantly since Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the odds are not always on the side of brute computational power.

Actually, Fritz has less brute computational power than Deep Blue. Fritz runs on standard PCs; in this case, a quad 2.8 GHz Xeon. Deep Blue ran on custom hardware, with 32 RS/6000 CPUs with 256 custom VLSI "chess processors". It was estimated to evaluate 100,000,000 positions per second.

The point is, Fritz is not a bigger number cruncher; it's better because it's "smarter", which to say, it has a better ability to judge the value of each position and to choose which avenues to explore.

In my preparation I tried to play this kind of anti-computer strategy, in some rapid training games. I could see clearly that it's not working anymore. The positional technique of this program is so much higher than years ago. It pushes pawns, builds the center, and begins activity on the flank. You cannot play like this anymore against computers. So many things I looked at in my preparations simply didn't work. I was shocked to see the level of positional improvement they had made.

Dear X3D advertising department:

When you use images like this one that make it look like your celebrity is struggling to squeeze out a huge turd, it doesn't make me very interested in your product.