Author: pete
Date: 13:38:27 05/16/00
Go up one level in this thread
On May 16, 2000 at 13:27:29, Fernando Villegas wrote: >On May 16, 2000 at 13:18:34, Michel Langeveld wrote: > >>So why not a forklift truck on a World Championship of weightlifting. > >Hi Michel: >Perhaps yours is not the perfect example. Machine that lift weights are from the >beginning stronger than even Hercules. No mistery to solve. Is not the same with >chess programs: in fact the idea of making them play the best human player is >precisely to see how strong they are. Besides some improvement of human playing >could emerge from this kind of competition. There is plenty of room for >dicoveries and a challenge to the usual way we play chess. Many discoveries in >the realms of openning, perhaps. Nothing of that is like competing againts a >machine that just lift something. Different would be or will be the day there is >no doubt at all and just any top program can defeat any top human player. But >for now is not so and so we are going to lose a source of excitment and eventual >progress both for programmers and human players. But in any case I agree this is >a debatable point. >Fernando Maybe it is the wrong forum to discuss this but in fact I completely agree to your opinion and want to add a few additional aspects. Chess has _often_ been declared dead . Two probably most well-known examples are the roaring 20s when most GMs seemed to agree about the "Draw Death" of chess meaning that two players of reasonable strength will always be able to get a draw whenever they liked as chess was more or less solved . Then came Aljechin ... If I remember it right in 1970 Bobby Fisher ( after at last researching some other openings than Sozin , King's Indian and the Ruy and trying things like the Evan's , King's gambit at the Olympiad ) said something like :" There are no surprises anymore , no odd gambits anymore , nothing new under the sun . " Then look at Kasparov's performance last year !! Look at all the new openings found being playable and promising since 1970 ! How much is the _human_ progress since 1960 ? since 1980 ? since 1990 ? Although there might be a rating inflation nobody can safely deny that there _has_ been progress. And what has this to do with computerchess ? Well : imagine a young Russian IM training KRPKR : maybe he sits there studying with a chessprogram and the Nalimov tablebases : likely ? I think : yes . Some years ago there was a match between Kasparov and the Swiss national team and I remember him doing the preparation with some Chessbase Database in incredible speed learning about the opponents and got nearly all of them at their weaknesses . It is also well-known that GMs are training against chessprograms nowadays . What will this bring ? I suspect very much that in the near future we will see humans playing with an tactical accuracy beyond belief . Even nowadays it has become very difficult to find a tactical mistake in a GM game ; blunders _do_ happen . but compair this with an analysis on famous tournaments like Karlsbad 1929 . Computers will rule tactics soon ( if they not already do ) but I think people who expect computers will be completely unbeatable in 5 years underestimate the _human_ mind .
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.