Author: Andre Godat
Date: 02:41:07 12/26/01
The other day, on a different thread, somebody posted a message in which he stated that, for all he knows, there may be a "retard" somewhere who can play chess better than Kasparov. It is obvious to me that there's a gigantic dividing line between a memory savant like "Rain Man", who can memorize every game database in existence and still contribute nothing to the game and a genius who can can add his own original touch and take the game to its highest level ever. If I pretend that Fritz is a real person--and I do it every day--there is no question that he's an idiot-savant. In analysis mode, he just calculates until I tell him to stop. He doesn't care about money or women or even chess itself; the game is, for him, just a math problem he's trying to solve. But humans don't look at a billion positions and say, "Well, this line is +1.41 and that line is +1.51, so I'll go with the latter." It simply isn't possible, but that may be what "Rain Man" would try to do. Even in chess, Fritz can be amazingly idiotic. He has no intuition or strategic sense. He has thousands of opening moves in his book, but he doesn't really KNOW any openings in the sense of having an understanding of the typical middlegames resulting from those openings. Yet his very ignorance is a source of some remarkable novelties. He doesn't "know" that Black is supposed to attack on the kingside in the Dutch Defense, so if he sees something on the queenside that he likes, he'll play there. One final point: When the day comes that a computer program is invincible (we'll call this creature Fritz 17) it may be that it still won't be superior to a Super-GM using today's best software as a blunder checker only. The strongest player possible today is the best program, running on the fastest processor, and assisted by a very strong GM who makes up for its horizon-based idiocy. It may be that no stronger player is possible. It may be that a Kasparov-caliber human could take today's technology and never lose a correspondence game to anyone or anything. Maybe God will share his 32-man tablebase with me and let me know the ultimate truth about the game.
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