Author: Robin Smith
Date: 11:47:32 06/25/05
In a previous thread some people have been repeatedly stating that choosing
1...e5 as a human’s defense against 1.e5 is a very poor choice. They said
practice has repeatedly shown this. I posted some games to the contrary and was
accused of "cherry picking" (which was true enough). So I decided to go back and
look at all the recent man-machine matches between strong humans and strong
computers. The results were a surprise, even for me. The matches I looked at
were:
Deep Blue-Kasparov 1996, Deep Blue-Kasparov 1997, Deep Fritz-Kramnik 2002,
Rebel-van Wely 2002, X3D Fritz-Kasparov 2003, Hiarcs-Bareev 2003 and
Junior-Kasparov 2003
I may have missed some matches, but if I did it was not my intention or cherry
picking. I deliberately excluded Hydra-Adams, since the discussions have been
about Adam's supposedly poor decision making process in choosing 1...e5 as his
defense of choice, and this decision had to be made prior to the match. I also
only looked at games where the computer played white, since that is what the
ruckus has all been about.
The results from the above matches were:
1.e4 e5 white (computer) scored 50% in 5 games
1.e4 other white (computer) scored 68% in 11 games
not 1.e4 white (computer) scored 67% in 3 games
If I were Adams, and 1...e5 was the mainstay of my opening repertior, I would
not see anything in these statistics to change my mind. Perhaps people who have
been vociferous about Adams "poor opening choice" may have been coloring their
thinking based on Crafty blitz games on ICC. These are hardly the games upon
which to make ones opening choices for a serious tournament time control match
with money on the line.
Below is a table of results for the games. Scores are from the white (computer)
perspective.
opening: 1.e4 e5 1.e4 other not 1.e4
event score # games score # games score # games
Deep Blue-Kasparov 1996 0 1 1.5 2 0 0
Deep Blue-Kasparov 1997 1 1 1.5 2 0 0
Deep Fritz-Kramnik 2002 0.5 2 0 0 1.5 2
Rebel-van Wely 2002 0 0 2 2 0 0
X3D Fritz-Kasparov 2003 1 1 0 0 0.5 1
Hiarcs-Bareev 2003 0 0 1 2 0 0
Junior-Kasparov 2003 0 0 1.5 3 0 0
total 2.5 5 7.5 11 2 3
score 50% 68% 67%
-Robin
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