Author: Hermano Ecuadoriano
Date: 09:57:11 11/19/00
A deeper humiliation is coming that is worse than losing. It has always been a popular sport, in chess, to argue about the styles and strengths of the great players of the past, and we all have our opinions. I spent too much time studying chess history. My goal was something like a continuation, to _completion_, of Reti's book on the evolution of chess ideas. This goal was too ambitious. It hurts me that raw strength over the board overcomes philosophy- even the hoped for "correct philosophy" would be overrun by naked strength. (There is my second use of the word naked in one week.) This is how I felt about the Karpov-Kasparov matches. So we are left with something less than mathemetical: we have our preferences, based on our accumulated judgement. Even if chess playing programs were never to pass a formal Turing test (that is not the issue here), something is coming that might be even more devastating for chess-mankind: We might begin to prefer their play, and generally accept it as "better" in the philosophical sense above. This would be an admission that a mechanical algorithm has replaced or rendered moot or superfluous all that we considered "soul" and "spirit" in chess. Students of the game will study the "style" of their favorite program, instead of the personalities of the past that we "loved" and wrongly worshipped. And they will probably be right to do so. My formerly youthful philosophical pretensions have been exposed. And when the "styles" of Petrosian and Karpov and Tal are exposed as well, perhaps we will have at last the end of Reti's book, written by a computer.
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