Author: Otello Gnaramori
Date: 10:43:47 07/07/01
The following article appeared just some days before the Argentinian Master on the neswpaper "La Nacion" . I've tried a translation in english. Disclaimer :Copyright 2001 "LA NACION" All rights reserved Chess: A Tiger paw blow on the board By Carlos A. Ilardo Four years after the famous chess exhibition made in New York between N° 1 of the world, the Russian Garry Kasparov, and the supercomputer Deep Blue, the maximum talent created by a group of scientists of the North American Company IBM, Argentina will be host of a peculiar competition, that does not register antecedents in the country. A chess contest that will open a new chapter in the duel between natural brains v. artificial brains. The German program Chess Tiger 14.0, ran by a conventional computer (Pentium III 866 Mhz), will challenge the discernment of eleven South American Chessmasters, among them seven Argentineans, in the IV Master of the Argentine Republic, Mercorsur Cup 110° Anniversary of Florida, that will be played between the 22nd of June and the 6th of July, in the halls CM Salud , Domingo F. Sarmiento 1755, in the party of Vicente Lopez. The unpublished experience in the country will have, in addition, the application of a new system of score - similar to soccer for the practice of the chess, that will award with three points the victory, with one tie and zero for the defeat. The Argentine ChessMasters Pablo Ricardi, Oscar Panno, Alexander Hoffman, Sergio Slipak, Enrique Scarella, Diego Valerga and Mauricio Dorín along with the Uruguayan Andrés Rodriguez, the Brazilians, Everaldo Matsuura and Eduardo Limp and Cuban Miguel Andrés will be the exponents of the human race in charge to decipher the devilish mysteries that the talent (4° in the ranking of the best programs of the world), will scatter between the 64 squares of the board during the eleven days of game. With this competition, another round of the unequal battle man v. machine, we are expecting to discover the new advances of the cybernetics in the land of an intimately related discipline with the intellect of the humans. Again the chess, mind sport in excellence, will demonstrate how much of art-game-science it locks in its world of black & white files and ranks. Chess Tiger, a product of the German company Chessbase whose commercial value is about $ 80, was authorized by its owners (will be operated by Roberto Alvarez, representative of the company in Argentina) to take part from this test-debut (other programs of the company already had some successful experience in matches made in Holland and Germany), since with the new creation (Tiger 14.0) experiment has not yet been made against ChessMasters in any contest of the world. In Europe tests with other programs, even more powerful, were executed, like Deep Fritz (German) or Deep Junior (Israeli) in matches against of the strong masters of the elite. The victories obtained versus stars of this game like Anand, Shirov, Morozevich, Leko and Adams are the best evidences of the enviable reached force, in the beginning of XXI century, by these silicon monsters. Chess Tiger 14.0 has a Elo (score with which the force of a chess player is measured) of 2578 points, a comparable strength with the one of a grand master. For that reason it will head the preclassification of the match, followed by the quintuple Argentine champion Pablo Ricardi (Elo 2554). The organization of the contest arranged that, although the machine will face each one of the players, its final performance will not be considered for the standings table , is to say that if Tiger prevails (quite probable thing) the winner of the test will be the human who win more points. Although do not exist antecedent of games between Chess Tiger with mortal beings, one knows that the virtues of the new talent are more than its defects and, although, its capacity of analysis, between 100 thousand and 150 thousand positions per second is very distant from the famous Deep Blue - that won to Kasparov by 3.5 to 2.5, in 1997, whose power of calculation reached 200 million of positions/sec. -, this program, in addition, does not act only by brute force (speed of calculation), but its tree of variants, more limited, selects the most favorable continuations, with an important adding : the same error won't be repeated. That is to say, if it loses a game with certain variant will not return to execute identical sequence in the following game. The chess players know that the "Achille's heel" of the machines is in the game of closed positions, loaded with strong strategic concepts, but also they know that the exactitude of its calculations is able to allow the announcement of the checkmate in 79 moves in endgames with few pieces , like for example between tower and bishop against tower. Discovering where is located the on/off key of the device , at first sight, can be one of the best strategy that chess masters have to face the challenge. Copyright 2001 SA LA NACION | All rights reserved.
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