DRAW LEAVES MAN, MACHINE TIED IN CHESS MATCH.

Byline: William R. Macklin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that faced world chess champion Garry Kasparov Tuesday in the third round of their six-game match, is beginning to look like the data-age version of the Little Engine That Could.

At the Convention Center on Tuesday, the silicon-chip challenger frustrated Kasparov's early advantage, battling the highest-rated player in the history of the game to a draw on the 39th move.

The match now stands at 1-1/2 games each.

As he strolled from the dimly lit chamber where he had played the three-hour game, Kasparov, who played black, said that had his opponent been human, "I would have won."

He suggested that the computer, which has no concept of a draw and relies on its operators to decide when a game cannot be won, had been unusually strong on the defense despite a weak opening strategy.

"I don't know who prepared the machine for the game," he said during a brief question-and-answer session with spectators. "But obviously the position was missed."

In fact, the 16 moves of the machine's opening, called the Alapin Sicilian, were dictated by grandmaster Joel Benjamin, who serves as a chess consultant for the IBM team that developed Deep Blue.

Benjamin said there was not enough time to test all the possible responses to the database of moves that was programmed into the computer Monday. He admitted that he was surprised when, on the 18th move, Deep Blue did not seize a bishop.

"It didn't really get the kind of positioning I wanted," said Benjamin, considered one of the world's best players. "Not because the opening was bad, but because Deep Blue makes decisions on its own" after it has exhausted the moves in its opening book.

In the opening game Saturday, Kasparov was forced to resign, giving Deep Blue an upset victory that stunned experts who expected the grandmaster to sweep the series.

Kasparov, who suggested that he was unimpressed by the machine's offensive play, said there was no disputing Deep Blue's status as one of the world's greatest chess players. He said the machine, which can analyze up to 50 billion moves every three minutes, probably would warrant an international rating of 2,700. An average rating for an internationally ranked player would be 1,208. Kasparov, who shares the top rating with fellow Russian grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, is at 2,775.

The technical glitches that cropped up in Saturday's game were absent Tuesday, but human error was not.

At the start of the game, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, one of Deep Blue's designers, gave the computer a bad command, prompting what amounted to a fit of confusion on the machine's part.

Going into the final three games, which start today, Kasparov will play white in two games, giving him a small advantage.