[MEHDI]

A lot has been said recently about how super-computers will put an end to chess. Is chess really finite?

KRAMNIK:
It’s finite, no doubt, but it’s a number with 27 or 28 zeros – for the human mind it’s still infinite. Checkers, and particularly Russian checkers, really has been exhausted by computers, if you can put it like that. Chess is too complex: even the most powerful computers we use to train can analyse positions to a maximum of about 30 moves ahead. Games, meanwhile, can sometimes stretch to 200 moves. Yes, computers are strong, but they don’t calculate the game to the end and sometimes they make mistakes.

You actually competed against a computer and started off leading but finally drew. Kasparov once lost!

KRAMNIK:
He lost more due to carelessness, because at that point computers were much weaker. Back then he just collapsed, as he began to imagine that someone was helping the computer. He was clearly stronger than the machine, and if he’d been more mentally stable he’d have beaten the computer. I played a few years later against a much more powerful machine. After the first half of the match I was leading by two points, but then I lost two games in a row. It was probably tiredness: when you play against a machine you have to maintain fantastic concentration, much greater than against a human being – the machine never gets tired! In the end it was a 4:4 draw. In 2006 it was almost impossible to beat the machines as they were already very powerful. The most you could hope for was to draw, which I was close to doing. Since then computers have moved far ahead and such a match no longer has any sporting interest. A human being is doomed to lose.

Kramnik: “Intellectual effort gives me enormous pleasure”