The Last Straw: Sports fans have an exaggerated sense of belonging to the teams they follow. An Irish Manchester United supporter will frequently use the term "we" when referring to the club, a pronoun which, strictly speaking, only applies if the supporter is, for example, J.P. McManus. But in discussing the performance of one team in a current sporting event, I make no apology for saying that "we" have had a very good week, writes J.P. McManus
In case you haven't been following it, I can report that mankind has taken a potentially decisive lead in the "Brains in Bahrain" chess challenge. After a tentative opening, our representative - Russia's Vladimir Kramnik - won games two and three of the eight-part contest with "Deep Fritz", supposedly the strongest computer chess programme ever written. The result of game four was not available when going to press, but all the indications from Bahrain are that Fritz is rattled.
This seemed an unlikely prospect last weekend. Boasting the ability to calculate three million moves a second, Fritz was the microchip equivalent of a young Mike Tyson. A lesser programme had beaten the then top human Gary Kasparov in 1997; and in a pathetic attempt to psyche out his opponent on the eve of the match, Kramnik had spoken of pitting human creativity against a "brutally fast machine" with "monstrous calculating power".
In the event, Kramnik has frustrated his opponent by adopting what chess experts call "quiet positions". Where Kasparov's flamboyance played to the computer's strengths, Kramnik typically spends 57 moves and several hours building up a slight positional advantage with his king-side pawns. This does the computer's head in; and under pressure, Fritz's decision-making has become progressively more erratic, like Hal's in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He hasn't started singing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do" yet, but we still have five games to go.
When I use the term "we", I do so only as a member of the same species (broadly speaking) as Kramnik. My involvement in chess began and ended at the age of 13 in the first round of a school tournament, against one of the senior students. I still remember the excitement when, early on, my opponent moved a pawn in such a way as to leave his king in check to my bishop. Before he could realise his mistake I seized the bishop and, knocking the king clean off the board, announced "checkmate". The other player calmly replaced the two pieces and then, also calmly, explained the rules of the game. After that, he adopted a series of quiet positions, gradually undermining my queen-side pawns and, in the process, giving me a king-size pain the rear. I lost, though not before I had stopped caring.
But at least my interest in chess was awakened in time for the epic 1978 world championship match, in which the Russian dissident, Viktor Korchnoi, challenged the Russian non-dissident, Anatoly Karpov. A Cold War classic, it was marked by disputes over everything from Korchnoi's mirror sunglasses (designed to stop Karpov staring), to Karpov's use of yoghurt during snack breaks (Korchnoi suspected a system of colour-coded messages). But most of the rows were about hypnotism.
Karpov was accompanied throughout by the sinister Dr Zukhar, who sat in the front rows and stared at Korchnoi. Korchnoi's people retaliated by sitting beside Zukhar and staring at him. At one point they resorted to "tickling and kicking" him; until, after a ruling by the organisers, he was moved to the back of the hall. But when Korchnoi employed the services of transcendental meditators with criminal records, the Soviet delegation reneged on the seating agreement. With the first-to-six-wins match poised at 5-5 going into the 32nd game, the struggling Karpov rallied and, thanks to a controversial move (Dr Zukhar to row three), retained his title.
They don't make chess games like that any more. When you're playing a computer, especially, there's not much chance of distracting your opponent, short of spilling coffee on him (computers hate this). But while our current champion has fewer human foibles than his predecessors, it's reassuring to know that one of us can still beat the best computer intelligence offers.
I know you're probably saying that we shouldn't feel threatened by technology. So I refer you to an article in the New York Times this week which describes the latest developments in Japanese toilet manufacture. Among the recent innovations are toilets with infra-red sensors that flip up the lid on your approach, and seats with electrodes, which send a mild charge through the buttocks to give you a digital read-out of your body-fat ratio. Talking lavatories are on the horizon, apparently; as are Internet-capable facilities, to allow remote monitoring of functions by the family doctor.
In short, soon, even your toilet is going to be several moves ahead of you. This is why I'm cheering for Kramnik.