Photos: Chess supercomputer crushes grandmaster

Chess grandmaster Michael Adams discusses his loss to Hydra, a supercomputer with the processing power of 200 million moves a second. He managed a draw in six games. According to the tournament site, Match Arbiter Albert Vasse said he's never seen a human play as well against a machine and conceded that humans don't stand a chance anymore.

The Hydra chess supercomputer is a cluster of 16 nodes of four computers, with each node holding 32GB of memory. It lives in a server room in Abu Dhabi. For the match Hydra utilized 32 PCs running on Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors.

British chess champion Michael Adams studies the board in London's Wembley Conference Center in Game 3 of his six-game match against supercomputer Hydra. Adams, weary from his marathon match the day before, lost to the computer.

In Game 2 of the six-game chess match, chess grandmaster Michael Adams and supercomputer Hydra played to a five and a half hour draw. Hydra won the first game.

In Game 1, chessmaster Michael Adams tries to come up with a winning combination. Hydra won the game in just 33 moves.

Chrilly Donninger (right), designer of the computer chess program Hydra, chats with U.K. chess grandmaster Michael Adams at a May 2005 press conference in London. Adams is playing a six-match chess tournament against Hydra for a $150,000 prize.

Chess Grandmaster Michael Adams, the No. 1 ranked chess player in the U.K. and No. 7 worldwide, practices against a computer.

Hydra's view of his opponent. The supercomputer was named after a seven-headed monster.