The delighted programmers of Junior, Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky of Israel, had just finished speaking at the game three postgame press conference when Kasparov surprised us by showing up.
I sincerely thought Kasparov was joking when he responded to Seirawan's question about Shay and Amir's comments with, "The program is stupid and the programmers are arrogant!" Whoa! I wasn't videotaping it, unfortunately, because we didn't expect GK to come down after a loss. The audacious comment drew a good laugh from the audience, but before he recovered a to talk variations I think he was very much angered by Ban and Bushinsky's comments, or lack thereof.
The issue was that they had said nothing about how Kasparov had been winning at one point and later passed up a likely drawn line to blunder away the game in one move. Kasparov wanted this on the record and repeated several times that he had outplayed Junior completely in all three games and could be leading 2.5-0.5 or even 3-0 if he had managed to finish off his good positions.
Of course this is always the problem against computers! It's a coincidence that game three worked out like this when you look at the article I wrote on game two at ChessBase. I talked about how the top humans are stronger overall, but a computer's ability to instantly punish a blunder evens things out. Migstradamus rides again!
