Eight years after the Deep Blue supercomputer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in disputed circumstances, another man and another machine are stepping forward to represent their kind in a battle of wit and nerve.

Technically, of course, only the human competitor, the British No 1 Michael Adams, will be drawing on his reserves of wit and nerve. The computer, called Hydra, will be relying on the brute force of its processing power, which it allows it to consider the outcome of 200 million potential moves per second.

"Michael is a tough competitor," acknowledges Syed Basar Shueb, the general manager of PAL Group, the company that created Hydra. "We can’t be certain that we will win this tournament but it will provide a good test for us." At the tournament preview in central London, Mr Shueb said he was confident that Hydra would put up a good fight during the series of six matches, which will take place at Wembley Conference Centre in London at the end of June.

There is a serious side to the contest, which is intended to highlight the relentless pace of computer development. Hydra, which weighs half a ton and is six times faster than Deep Blue, the IBM machine that defeated Mr Kasporov in 1997, could prove invaluable in the fight against crime.

The speed with which it can carry out calculations makes it ideal for finding matches within huge databases of fingerprints or DNA samples. Mr Shueb said that if every fingerprint in the UK were held in a database, Hydra would be able to match an unknown print in less than a second. The computer could also speed up any process that requires large numbers of calculations, including the planning of space travel, business systems simulations and code-breaking.

The 1997 Deep Blue chess match ended in acrimony when Mr Kasparov suggested that IBM’s computer was receiving human assistance. IBM denied the accusations, but conspiracy theories flourished after the company’s prompt dismantling of the computer. Organisers insist that the tournament between Hydra and Mr Adams, for which there is a purse of £80,000, will be a fair fight.

Even if humanity comes out on top in June, however, the triumph may be short-lived. Mr Shueb said his company has plans to upgrade Hydra by doubling the number of processors it contains from 32 to 64, further increasing its computer power and bringing forward the day when computers will render human chess players obsolete. "We will keep upgrading software and we will keep upgrading hardware," he said.

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