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Subject: Re: Deep Fritz v Kramnik - Good Cause For Pessimism

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:03:03 06/25/01

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On June 25, 2001 at 09:30:37, Graham Laight wrote:

>
>I think that people who've been around a long time might disagree with this.
>
>The first victory by a computer against a GM was at G5 time control. The GM
>famously said, "Bloody iron monster" when he realised that he'd made the
>tactical mistake that would cost him the game.
>
>If my memory serves me correctly, that was in the late 1960s. I don't think that
>any computers beat GMs at tournament time controls until the 1990s. They simply
>weren't good enough.
>
>-g
>


If someone wants to _seriously_ wager that if a computer plays a GM at
1 minute per game, 5 minutes per game, 10 minutes per game, 15 minutes
per game and 30 minutes per game, and the computer will do better and
better as the games become longer, I will set the experiment up on ICC
anytime they want.

Of course, I don't think anyone _seriously_ believes that.

I can't imagine anyone being so foolish.

One good example was back around 1991 or 1992.  IM Mike Valvo played deep
thought lots of blitz games at various ACM events and he simply got mopped up
badly, never winning a game and barely drawing one here and there.  He played
it two 24-hour-per-move games in rec.games.chess, and he blew it out in both
games, with the machine never having any sort of a chance at all.

That "gets better with more time theory" is correct in one regard.  More time
means better analysis by the machine.  But it is also wrong in a more important
regard.  The human gets better at a faster rate of change than the computer,
as time controls are lengthened.

It has _always_ been so.  It will be so for a _long_ time.  More time reduces
the importance of tactics, which is what the computer lives and survives on.
As tactics dwindle, reliance on "knowledge" increases.  And here, the computer
is woefully behind.



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