Commentary for white move 3:

Mr. SEIRAWAN: What we have in the opening move is the developing move Nf1920. Deep Blue took the center with the move d5, then game g3. The idea is to put this bishop, to fianchetto this bishop on the long diagonal but putting the bishop on g2 and castling behind the bishop. This is known as building a house. When Deep Blue responded with the move bishop d4 he was -- what he was doing was putting direct ssure upon this knight and threatening to capture it. And the normal response would have been to defend the knight with the move Bg2 so that the pawns would not have been doubled. From a positional consideration, it's considered a disadvantage to have your pawns doubled.

Mr. SEIRAWAN: Garry's move, b2-B3, simply ignoring Deep Blue's threat, is a surprise. I would not have dicted this move, and so he, Garry, certainly has an idea much induce -- idea of inducing Deep Blue to give up the two bishops.

Mr. VALVO: Let's just think about that for a second. Garry has another motive in mind here. He wants to get the /TPH-PB -- get the machine out of book.

Mr. SEIRAWAN: What do you mean by out of book?

Mr. VALVO: Computers play openings very badly and what has been done is we programmed into the machines all of the games that have been played before as much as we can, and we call that "book," prior knowledge. So the computer doesn't have to think on its own in the beginning, it just plays moves other grandmasters have played. Here it's obviously on its own, it would have replied right away if it had something in its book so it's thinking. This is to Garry's advantage.

Mr. VALVO: Another advantage Garry has, he wants to find out if in fact bishop takes knight is going to occur. The computer thinks bishops are significantly better than knights, so it probably won't take it even though it's going to get a doubled pawn back as an advantage. Garry has two advantages here, he wants to get out of book and wants to find out what the computer is going to do.

Mr. ASHLEY: The computer has in fact ignored capturing the knight on f3 and instead has developed a night from b8 to d7 and it did not take it too long to make this response. Garry /PH-T meantime looked very confident. He was aware of what he had done by playing the move b2- b3 and now has responded immediately with the move the very natural developing move, Bc1- b2 controlling the e5 score. What do you think about this position?

Mr. SEIRAWAN: A normal, average position. We can't look too deeply into the /TPWAO*EU game right now at its earliest stages. We'll probably in a few moves time come back and start rethinking what has taken place. I just wanted to add a few things and get Mike's comments too.

Mr. SEIRAWAN: Essentially we now know today that Deep Blue is doing this incredible calculation of 200 million positions per seconds -- per second.

Mr. VALVO: Think about that for a second. (Laughter.)

Mr. SEIRAWAN: Every five seconds, Deep Blue is looking at a billion positions. And if it thinks for a minute, then it's looking at 60 billion moves a second. Have I got that right? No, it's six billion.

Mr. VALVO: I was never very good at math. (Laughter.)

Mr. SEIRAWAN: 12 billion moves --

Mr. VALVO: It's a big number.

Mr. SEIRAWAN: It's a big number.

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