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Subject: Re: the "greatest achievement of any computer program in history"

Author: Jason Williamson

Date: 00:51:00 08/06/00

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On August 06, 2000 at 02:49:50, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>From the front page of www.chessbase.com:
>
>> DORTMUND 2000 - DAY 9: SUPER-GM PERFORMANCE BY JUNIOR
>> On the final day in Dortmund Anand outplayed Hübner to catch up with
>> Kramnik and share first place with him. In the meantime Junior defeated
>> Leko to end up with an overall score of 50% and a super-GM performance
>> of 2703. This is the greatest achievement of any computer program in
>> history.
>
>With all due respect to Amir and Shay, this claim is simply over the top.  For
>instance, I would consider the software that piloted Voyager 2 to close views of
>several planets over the last decade to be a much greater achievement.
>Presumably what was meant was that Junior's result was the greatest achievement
>of any computer chess program in history, which would be (merely ;-)
>controversial.
>
>Dave

Agreed, but certainly it will sell copies of Deep Junior, which is clearly what
is intended by these statements.  For I can't figure out any other possible
explanation for the claims I see.  I mean, clearly 50% against some of worlds
best is not as good as +3 against the World Champion.  There is NO possible
calculation that can be made that could change that.   As to programs in non
Chess areas, well, the software that runs various life saving medical equipment
comes to mind.  I would venture that any OS is a more important achievement then
a chess program.  And if Microsoft actually came out with a stable Windows that
would clearly be one of the greatest software engineering feats of all time.

JW



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