Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 23:31:54 10/18/04
Several years ago, back before RGCC even existed (before Rec.games.chess split), computers were lucky to beat human masters. Then the masters fell, then the international masters, and now computers are as good as most GMs, maybe as good as all but the top GMs, and maybe somewhat better than the top GMs. Who knows. The point, however, is that progress is indeed being made, and it doesn't show any sign of abating. My questions are these: Will computers ever become so strong that GMs will feel lucky even to draw? Will the percentage of GM versus computer draws slowly diminish, even among the top humans, so that computers will someday completely and totally dominate? Remember...chess isn't a solved game. Perhaps white always win. So as computers improve, they should begin to win more and more often as their strength comes to approximate perfect play. But even if white doesn't always win, it may nevertheless be that if the 2nd best move is made in any position, that side is lost. Maybe perfect play can only draw and anything else loses. And just which side do you think might make the 2nd best move...the human or some future Quantum-computing beast? Another reason to believe that eventually even the strongest humans will be on the losing side: Recently, it was posted that as computers have become faster, programs authors have actually been REMOVING knowledge from their evaluation function. In other words, deeper searches are better than explicit knowledge, this presumably because chess has proven to "consist" more of combinatorial tactics than of positional strategy. Accordingly, it would seem that the humans are the ones with the "horizon effect" (Surprise!!), meaning that the combinatorial tactics that computers handle quite nicely just doesn't reduce as much to positional rules as we might like. Sure, humans might learn a few tricks from computers as computers continue to improve, but once we've lost the lead, we won't ever regain it. What happens when a computer regularly searchs to double the number of plies we see today. Can a human GM even draw such a beast? Roger
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