Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 11:38:43 04/21/02
Go up one level in this thread
On April 21, 2002 at 13:25:50, Boaz Emanuel Berg wrote: >I can not really say if Fritz 7 has Grandmasterstrength or not. Fritz play can >change a lot from position to position. Still I havn´t played so many games >against the program and the games I played I have only tried my usual lines. > >If I would play a lot of games and search for Fritz weaknesses I would know more >about the strength of the program. > >Myself I am not so interested in the GM-strength or not. I think it´s a very >good analyse- and trainingpartner. My reason to play against Fritz is mainly >because I want to find my weaknesses in the openings and to test new openings, >before I play them in real tournaments. > >\Emanuel Berg It is interesting to hear that IM Berg is not certain that Fritz 7 is grandmaster strength, which is generally considered to be around 2500. Yet so many non-IMs believe Fritz to be 2700 or stronger. I think people may mix up "rating" with "strength." The two concepts have usually gone hand-in-hand over the decades but CAN sometimes become very separated. The current "rating" of the top programs may indeed be 2700, but does this positively represent their true *strength* or could it be an anomaly due to the fact that humans have not yet adopted survival skills (which they must add to their normal chess skills) for facing the completely different set of strengths and weaknesses that computers present? Isn't it possible that computers' strengths are being over-exercised (and their weaknesses under-exercised) at the moment due to their newness? The rate of car accidents in the first decades of automobile usage was much higher than later when dealing with fast traffic had become "old hat" to people. Yet there were people in circa 1915 saying that accident rates would continue to rise forever because, after all, that was what had been happinging in the previous few years. Luckily for us all, most (not all) people grew accustomed to traffic and developed new sets of skills to deal successfully with it. Accident rates have not fallen to zero, and computer ratings will not fall to 2200. But today's computers might find themselves falling from "2700+" to the "2500+" range (and will rise from there as hardware gets faster and software gets smarter).
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