THE WINNER AND STILL CHESS CHAMP A MAN.

Byline: Christopher McDougall Associated Press 

World chess champion Garry Kasparov won his final game over a supercomputer Saturday, sealing a victory in the historic six-game match pitting man against machine.

Kasparov forced IBM's Deep Blue to concede after 43 moves in 3 hours, 46 minutes.

Needing only a draw, the 32-year-old Russian nonetheless attacked from the first move, seeming determined to trounce a computer that can calculate more than 200 million moves a second.

The computer had defeated Kasparov in the first game Feb. 10, but Kasparov won the second and fifth games and earned draws in the third and fourth.

Yasser Seirawan, a commentator and international grandmaster, marveled at Deep Blue's unprecedented chess skill, despite its loss.

"I was stunned by its depth of analysis and how quickly it could move," he said. "It was unnerving - you want to say, 'Can't you even show a bead of sweat?' "

Seirawan estimated that the computer would rank among the 60 best players in the world.

After Saturday's win, Kasparov promised a rematch, saying it was "crucial to the world of chess."

Kasparov carried a 3-2 lead going into the last game. A draw would have given each player a half-point, and even a Kasparov loss would have tied the match.

But it became clear after his first few furious moves that the grandmaster wasn't playing it safe.

"They are going at a wicked pace," said commentator and grandmaster Maurice Ashley. "And when Kasparov takes that watch off - look out. He's on the hunt."

Kasparov, 32, quickly took control of the board, with pawns spearheading an attack by knights and bishops. Deep Blue wandered into trouble, allowing a knight to stray to the edge of the board in violation of a chess maxim: "Knights on rim, future dim."

More than 6 million spectators around the world followed the match move by move on the Internet. In Philadelphia, 700 chess fans sat transfixed during pauses as long as 30 minutes between plays.

Kasparov received $400,000 for winning the match. The IBM team has said it will use the $100,000 loser's prize for more research.

"This experiment has been a tremendous success," said Chung-Jen Tan, head of the research team.

The contest was the first to pit silicon chips against brain cells in a regulation, six-game match.

And Kasparov had an advantage in the last game: It was his turn to play the white pieces and go first.

The IBM team has been developing Deep Blue since Kasparov handily beat a prototype called Deep Thought in 1989.

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Photo Garry Kasparov plots a move in his match game against a computer. Associated Press