Politics and dirty tricks

Vikram Jayanti's fitfully engaging documentary is an exploration of the paranoia surrounding the historic 1997 chess match in which the world's greatest player, Gary Kasparov, lost to IBM's computer, Deep Blue. It is the kind of man-versus-machine tale that might have been conceived by Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams.

By seeming to take Kasparov's side in the ensuing debate over whether IBM "cheated" by infiltrating a human agency into the match, Jayanti allows the fallen Grand Master to reveal the extent of his own paranoid fantasy.

For reference, Jayanti points to a 19th-century fraud, a chess-playing automaton called The Turk, which actually beat Napoleon Bonaparte before it was discovered that the bulky device held a chess-playing person of restricted growth.

But given that Kasparov and the event were surrounded by all manner of computer geeks, conspiracy theorists, wild-eyed journalists and stonewalling security guards, it is a wonder that the match - played over six games - was ever completed.

BEYOND the occasionally overstylised editing and the Old Dark Spaceship soundtrack, I rather warmed to Kasparov, who was visibly moved on his return to the scene of his defeat. And the plethora of statistics here is enough to blow anyone's circuits: Deep Blue, for example, could run through 200 million chess positions a second.

Politics, dirty tricks, a Deep Throat voice-over - much of the pleasure gleaned from this fanciful documentary lies in its Len Deighton Cold War dressings. Best of all is Kasparov's agent, Owen Williams, a man so in thrall to his own image that he never takes off his RayBans or his hat and thus resembles a KGB agent rather too closely for comfort.