Author: karen Dall Lynn
Date: 14:06:50 01/25/02
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On January 25, 2002 at 16:46:38, ALI MIRAFZALI wrote: >I would like to know the opinion of the readers of this forum on the following >questions. >1.What would be the Elo rating of the perfect chessplayer? >2.Are there natural limits to the strenght that can be achieved in chess >for a computerchess player? (Not the present centuary but in any future;that >is what I mean by natural limits). >3.If the rating of perfect player is say x ;what would be the rating of >the stongest computer player ever(that is the best chessprogram that can be >ever contructed useing computer technology) .It would be x-?.Or would it be x? These are very interesting questions; they're not useful to any practical concern for now, but are food for thought yet they can be answered only for an ideal world. As one day a Turing Machine was taken as naked of any practical application (posterity proved it to be a blunder), I believe at least one of these questions might give room to some sc fi or fantasy. Let's wonder then. Indeed if we try to get empiricaly closer for instance to "the perfect chess player" we see that it sounds at least to me as "the perfectly spherical horse". A chess player is a cognitive agent and as such it cannot be perfect in this world of ours. It makes some sense only under the Reich of reason. But if you press the inquiry about what would be the rating of a perfect player, even fom a purely abstract point of view, I would say this question is imprecise if we analyse its own terms. The rating of a perfect player would not be a fixed number. Even ignoring the beauty and the art of the all-powerful strategy of a perfect chess player, from a quantitative point of view he would never lose or draw. So his rating would be an everlasting growing number, but the marginal growth would tend to decrease according to the rules for computing the rating points as the lag between the players' rating increases. So just make a progression: take the highest real ELO for the moment and supose as a thought experiment that this highest elo holder keeps playing a pontentially infinite number of games with the perfect player who wins all. I don't know the formulae to compute ELO ratings, but it is easy to see that such formulae might settle a limit to this progression. As the perfect player could not have the imperfection of stop playing, it is reasonable suppose he is an eternal being otherwise he wouldnot be so pefect; and, in the long run, he would be deemed to turn his gaze to a sky of white dwarf stars, in a world or universe without chess players, time, motion or even material stuff to build pieces, boards or computers. Then he would spend the rest of his tragic eternity playing blind games against himself, for draw. Karen.
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