Grandmaster's game of chess with computer

BANGALORE, INDIA: He is the master of the chessboard. The grandmaster who defeats man and machine with his calculated moves.

And when it comes to boost his brain power to pose the formidable  challenge as a world champion, Vishwanathan Anand relies more on the machine.

“The three top focus areas for me in the game of chess are performance, speed and memory,” said the grandmaster while interacting with the media at a special function organized by AMD in Bangalore, to felicitate him.

He further added that he has been using AMD's technology to simulate real-world chess environment while practicing at home and gets all the power and performance required to simulate a real-time intelligent and challenging chess game.

In the game of chess, it’s always important to take crucial and accurate decisions at the right time. And for that it is better to have the 'duel' with fast and multiprocessing technology, believes Anand.

He uses technology for making most of his game decisions like analyzing moves or deciding unusual and patterned moves and position in chess.

Commenting on the relevance of technology for a chess player he said, “Earlier when I started off as a chess player there was not much use of technology for the game. The first chess database had about twenty thousand games. Now my own database consists of twelve million games. Nowadays it's impossible to thoroughly study the game without computers,” he said.

He further added, “In the game of chess, only a well thought out decision can make the difference between winning and losing. Technology not only helps to analyze the game but also to strategize the moves better.”

Incidentally, computer gaming sometimes also acts a stress buster to the grandmaster.

Once in a while he also likes playing games like Grand Theft Auto, which are recommended by his friends.

Anand was gifted a Gaming Computer by AMD to honour him on retaining his world championship title. Quad-core phenom processor, and the one tera flop Ati Radeon 4870x2 graphics card power the gaming computer.