HIKARU NAKAMURA CRUSHES COMPUTER

Hikaru Nakamura has long been one of the best blitz chess players online, but can he really defeat a chess engine in three-minute, no-increment chess?!

In 2008, he did exactly that as he used an incredible anti-computer strategy of closing the position and offering two exchange sacrifices to convince the top engine at the time, Rybka, to overpress in an effort to avoid a fifty-move rule draw.

I had the great pleasure of watching these anti-computer battles live on the ICC (Internet Chess Club). My memory is slightly shaky, but I remember seeing masters like Nakamura and Rustemov (AKA Goldmund) scrape draws by closing the position against the engine. With trial and error, they would find strategies to best the engine as it monotonously repeated the strategic errors of previous games. It had no ability to learn from its errors as a human would.

Watching this live, one was excited to see Nakamura securing a comfortable draw, but as the game progressed, it suddenly became clear he was after more as he revealed the engine's hubris and fallibly greedy programming.