Shock Result - Human Beats Rybka!

Vadim Milov (pictured), the Russian born GM now living in Switzerland has inflicted a rare defeat on the strongest chess engine currently available - Rybka 3.  In a recent 8-game match with the silicon monster, Milov (rated a mighty 2705 Elo and ranked 28th among earth-dwelling carbon based life forms) ended the winner by a narrow margin of 4.5-3.5.

Hooray for humanity!

Before we start crowing too much about how computers are basically stupid (see the famous Kasparov Pepsi advert below), we should note grudgingly that Rybka was significantly handicapped for the match in several ways:

1. In two of the 4 games where Milov played White, Rybka gave a pawn odds (the f7 pawn).
2. In all four games where Milov was black, Rybka gave an exchange odds (a1 rook for b8 knight).
3. Rybka used a small handicap opening book.
4. Rybka was limited to the standard 3,4 and 5 man endgame databases.

Rybka was running on a 3Ghz Octal computer and the time control was 90 minutes for the game plus a 30 second increment per move.  All the games are below.