Author: Enrique Irazoqui
Date: 08:30:47 04/14/98
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It's nice to have a café talk... :) We judge chess from an anthropocentric point of view. It has to be like this, since the introduction of non-human chess players is relatively new. In this regard, we may consider as ugly some positional moves that don't adjust to our way of playing chess, and not necessarily because they are bad. Same about playing styles: Genius is boring, Mchess is fun. This is personal and not related to an objectively good or bad way to play chess. Chess is a game and the goal is winning. Winning scores are the most objective criteria we have. It has been said many times that computer-computer ratings don't relate to human ratings. Not proven but probably true. My question is: so what? Imagine we are in year 2020. Deepest Blue is the absolute world champion, after defeating Billy the Kid, the strongest micro. The best human player is ranked 7th by FIDE, 200 points behind DB. In this moment, ratings after human-human games are questioned. The real rating has to take into account how well people fare against the strongest: programs. And FIDE substitutes the "Gens una sumus" by "Players una sumus". Meanwhile we have two parallel rating scales. Who says one is more objectively valid than the other? We know most programs are tuned to play other programs. Probably they will do less well against human players. Some programs, Crafty for instance, if I understood Bob properly, are tuned to play human opponents. This may make Crafty weaker against programs. I mean to say it is possible to tune a program one way or another, and this tuning will make it relatively stronger against one kind of opponent and weaker against the other, but not stronger in absolute terms. For this it would have to score well against both, people and programs. So it doesn't seem to make much sense criticizing a program for not being tuned one way or another, for playing "ugly" or "beautiful". All we can say is we like them better. Programs play differently, but they do play strong chess. Maybe it's time to readjust our criteria of validation about what we consider good or bad in a game of chess aside from winning. Enrique
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