ChessBrain No Pawn in Match With Human

The kid had never been in a title bout.

In fact, ChessBrain was just 3 years old and had never gone one-on-one with a human being, let alone one of Denmark's top players, ranked 53rd in the world.

But there they were on a snowy night in Copenhagen, eager to engage in battle.

The Jan. 30 chess match pitted Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen against the more than 2,000 computers of a loosely knit, global web called ChessBrain -- the all-consuming pastime of Thousand Oaks software engineer Carlos Justiniano. The dust-up, which ended in a draw, established a Guinness record for "the world's largest networked chess computer."

For Justiniano, 38, it was the stuff of legend: "This is the direction science fiction travels," he said. "In the entire history of the planet, I'm not sure a collection of machines like this has collaborated to play a single game -- any kind of game -- against a human."

Over thousands of hours, Justiniano, a prodigy who rose out of the south Bronx in New York, had devoted himself to ChessBrain like a monk to a medieval manuscript, tweaking computer programs and e-mailing far-flung collaborators well into the night.

As his wife and young daughter slept, he labored in the glow of nine computer screens, envisioning the day ChessBrain would hold its own in high-level competition.

"It's been an incredible journey just to get to this point," said Justiniano, who quit his job with a Torrance software company in December to prepare for the Denmark match.

"To lose without making a blunder was the best we had hoped for," he said.

Computers that dabble in chess have been around since shortly after World War II, when scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory started experimenting with massive electronic machines named ENIAC and MANIAC. In 1997, the most famous chess-playing automaton, IBM's Deep Blue, decimated Garry Kasparov, then and now the world's best human chess player, in a confrontation avidly followed around the globe.

ChessBrain, though, is not a single machine. It's a "distributed-computing" system that depends totally on the kindness of strangers.

The concept is simple: Thousands of ordinary, desktop computers working together can do the same kind of hugely complex tasks as supercomputers. And they can do them silently, while their owners e-mail jokes to their pals or scan the Internet for old term papers.