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IDG News Service - World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has taken the third game of man vs. machine chess against the highly touted Deep Fritz 7 computer to lead 2.5 to 0.5 in an eight-game competition being held in Bahrain, the competition Web site reported yesterday.
Kramnik became world champion by defeating longtime champion Garry Kasparov in 2000 and is now in a strong position to pocket the $1 million prize for defeating the computer.
Kasparov lost in a similar man vs. machine clash against IBM's specialized Deep Blue chess computer in 1997, starting a round of predictions that machines would soon be able to outthink humans in many areas of endeavor.
Kramnik, who has won two and drawn one of the first three games of the match, billed as the "Brains in Bahrain," has made no secret of the difficulty of beating the best chess computers available, describing Deep Fritz 7 as "a very serious opponent."

"Deep Fritz is simply a stronger program than Deep Blue," he said recently.
Kramnik needs to gain two more points in the final five games to win the match outright, with a win worth one point and a draw worth half a point.
The third match lasted five hours and was decided, experts said, by an unexpected 18th move from Kramnik that saw Deep Fritz immediately forced to weaken its position, after the computer had had the better of him in the opening exchanges.
Deep Fritz 7 is based on standard hardware and thus scans about 3 million positions per second, compared with the custom-built Deep Blue's 100 million positions. But Deep Blue used to waste a lot of that parallel processing computing power on duplicate positions, according to Deep Fritz's developer, ChessBase GmbH in Germany.
The Deep Fritz 7 program can be purchased commercially for $99 and runs on PCs or machines with up to eight processors.
Updates on the match can be found on the Brains in Bahrain Web site.