Garry Kasparov has taken an early lead in his battle against a champion chess program.

The grandmaster beat Deep Junior at the weekend in the first of their six-game, $1m 'Man vs Machine' match in New York.

Kasparov, who lost against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue last year, took 27 moves and three hours 40 minutes to beat the Israeli-built program.

According to Reuters, Kasparov ignored the more cautious 'anti-computer' moves that he used against Deep Blue, and was much more daring this time.

Deep Junior, which calculates three million moves per second, used a strategy designed to produce tactical skirmishes rather than a full-on assault.

This should have made it difficult for Kasparov to follow, but he controlled the game from the outset.