Michael Adams takes on chess legend Garry Kasparov at a tournament in 1999. Photograph: Hidajet Delic/AP
The world's most powerful chess computer, "Hydra", is set to take on Britain's top grandmaster, Michael Adams, in a six-match standoff next month - with the winner scooping a purse of £80,000.
Hydra is a 64-way cluster computer - that's 64 PCs all hooked together - and its makers claim it can compute 200 million moves per second... and that it has never been beaten by a human.
Adams, a prodigal chess talent who became a grandmaster at the age of 17, said he wanted to prove "that nothing can match the power of human creativity".
I'm sure the chance of 80,000 smackers in his back pocket had little to do with it.
