Author: Rajen Gupta
Date: 02:05:02 04/17/01
if one sits backand and takes a dispassionate view of the upcoming man vs machine event i think we are all missing the woods for the trees. 1)that Braingames has manged to get kramnik's agreement to play such a match is itself extremely creditable; besides being able to find the necessary sponsorship etc. Kasparov after losing to deep blue has on several occasions refused to participate against a computer. 2) in order to find a worhty opponent for kramnik the best commercially available hardware/software combination needs to be found-ideally something that a budding bobby fischer can say ''wow'' thats a neat programme i want it-and get his mom to pop down to his friendly neighbourhood store(or cyberstore) and buy it.with dual athlons being available in the near term even explosive hardware is within the reach of joe public 3) while there are a lot of strong single cpu progs that could be in contention there is no doubt that any of the 3 SMP progs on a 8 way xeon 933 with 2mb on die cache would clobber the best single CPU prog rather badly. 4) currently there are only 3 commercially available SMP progs available and they will be playing each other to find which is the best one. whats wrong with that? if shredder is the best no doubt it will beat the other 2. if it loses then it wasn't the strongest any way in spite of it being the world comp champion.in the meanwhile we''l get the added benefit of enjoying a series of smp comp vs comp matches!on top level hardware. 5) someone needs to organise the above selection and in the considered opinion of the sponsor braingames and perhaps their chess expert(GM Keene) enrique irazoqui and bertil eklund are the best people to do so having had a great deal of expertise and experience in comp chess.i dont think anyone really doubts their personal integrity. 6)there is obviously a time frame for such things-quite certain that kramnik as well as the sponsors could change their minds at the drop of a hat so this has to get going while the time is right-which menns that the time available for testing (as well as developing the software is limited). if only one of the above 3 was arbitrarily selected there would have been more questions as to whether it is the srtongest. 7)no method of testing or selection is perfect-but this seems to be quite a reasonable method 8) i think all of us computer chess lovers should encourage this venture raher than trying to tear it aprt.after all if it is succesful there would hopefully be repeat performances. i think its time to close this chapter and move on to other matters rajen
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