Commentary for white move 21:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, we became world champion in 1994, and since then nothing has happened. Basically they ignore us. They now know that computers are better than all the humans, but it hasn't diminished the game in one way. People still play in tournaments, they enjoy the competition, they have a lot of fun.

GK MOVE: 2 1 Kb1

MAURICE ASHLEY: Kasparov has also moved his king off the possible sensitive diagonal to the square b1. Continue.

MIKE VALVO: I was just wondering, Jonathan is also a well-known computer chess programmer as well. He had a machine in a number of events that I ran. It was called Phoenix. Before chinook, he went over to chinook. I'd like to ask you why you gave up on chess computers, first of all, and I'd like you to continue on what has happened to the checker world since the wormed champion is now a machine.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you want the honest answer?

MIKE VALVO: Well, I don't want a dishonest one.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I know Murray Campbell very well. In fact by strange coincidence in 1974 we both were in the Canadian junior chess championship and we played in the second round.

MAURICE ASHLEY: Murray Campbell being a member of the Deep Blue team.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So we've known each other for a long, long time. 1989 at a sabbatical at Carnegie-Mellon where Feng Hsu and Murray Campbell were at and I heard about of course the Deep Blue -- or the IBM arrangement, and I began to think about my prospects with my chess program. Although it was one of the best in the world, one person working part time with no money on a chess program, it's very difficult to compete with the Deep Blue people having several people full time and the full backing of IBM. And coincidentally at that time I started tinkering with the checkers program and I made the decision if I wanted to win with a chess program it was the wrong place to be simply because of too much competition.

MIKE VALVO: Let me ask you a tickling kind of question. Is checkers easier than chess?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of all, I'm a chess player. I got involved in check /SKPERZ didn't know anything about it. I heard a lot of people say who cares about checkers, it's such an easy game.

MIKE VALVO: Jonathan is a Chessmaster, by the way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I also heard someone say Samuel solved the game of checkers in 1963.

MIKE VALVO: That wasn't true, right?

MIKE VALVO: A historical accident. What you can say about chess and checkers is there there's 10 to the 45th approximately possible chess positions, there's a 1 followed by 45 /SKPWHRAOERZ. Checkers is only a 1 followed by 20 zeros, so you can say --

MIKE VALVO: Relatively nothing.

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