World chess king Vladimir Kramnik and supercomputer Deep Fritz have weighed in ahead of their heavyweight man-against-machine clash in Bahrain in October.
The long-awaited contest comes four years after the then-world master Garry Kasparov lost sensationally to Deep Blue computer in a huge blow to human intelligence.
Kramnik, who toppled Kasparov in a dazzling display in London last year, is confident of gaining revenge over automation in the US$1 million showdown in the Middle East.
Kramnik concedes that his opponent, the world's most powerful chess computer program stored on a single disk, has the edge in one respect.
"Unlike Fritz, I cannot (process) 5 million moves per second," he said. "I would be very happy with one move per second. "But humans have an advantage over the computer, mostly on strategic points of the game. And therefore we can make long-term strategies much better than computers."
Kramnik gets US$800,000 if he wins eight games in succession in the series and US$600,000 if he loses.
At the press briefing, one of his opponent's creators said the program was not suffering any pre-match nerves.
"We are not nervous," said creator Frans Morsch. "We cannot change anything now. It will be much more difficult for my human opponent." He added that the computer even had the ability to learn from its mistakes over time.
"It wouldn't be the end of the world if a computer became the best player in the world," said Frederic Friedel, co-founder of the Deep Fritz team. "If one did, you would just exclude computers from competing in tournaments. The humans play on."
