Kasparov versus Deep Putin

This weekend russian opposition activist Garry Kasparov was among about 170 people arrested as police moved against a banned anti-Kremlin rally in Moscow. The former chess champion was freed several hours later after being fined for public order offences. Kasparov's passion for politics is so strong that in 2005 he retired from chess to focus his efforts on defeating President Vladimir Putin. Fron the very first moment, when he first appeared on the world stage in the 1980s, he quickly became known for his defiance of the Soviet authorities and - while dominating at the chess board - has been a leading figure in Russia's reformist movement since the collapse of the USSR.

Garry Kimovich Kasparov (Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров; born April in 1963, in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR) political life started in the 1980s. He joined the CPSU in 1984, was elected to the Central Committee of Komsomol, the youg communists. In 1990 he parted from CPSU. In May 1990 Kasparov took part in the creation of the Democratic Party of Russia.
In June 1993 he participated in the creation of the bloc of parties called Choice of Russia. And many people dont know that in 1996 Kasparov took part in the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin! Which, by the way, took Putin to power....

His first duel was against Karpov. But between Karpov and Putin there was a machine. In May 1997, an updated version of Deep Blue , a computer made by IBM, defeated Kasparov in Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6, in a highly publicised six-game match. This was the first time a computer had ever defeated a world champion in match play. A documentary film was made about this famous match-up entitled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. IBM keeps a web site of the event.

Kasparov claimed that several factors weighed against him in this match. In particular, he was denied access to Deep Blue's recent games, in contrast to the computer's team that could study hundreds of Kasparov's.After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players, in contravention of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match.

His frustrations with world chess were a major factor in his retirement two years ago, when he admitted he no longer had the same passion for the game, says the BBC. But his decision was also influenced by events in Russia, which he believed had been creeping towards authoritarianism since Putin took charge, and in Ukraine, which had just undergone the Orange Revolution:

The Other Russia combines elements of the now weakened and fragmented democratic movement with some of their bitterest former enemies - like the National Bolshevik Party, famous for its audacious anti-government stunts and quasi-Nazi symbols, or the far-left Workers' Russia, led by old-style communist firebrand Viktor Anpilov.

Now is Kasparov against Deep Putin. Looks like a bitter combat.