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Subject: Re: having to guess if computers are grandmasters

Author: Fernando Villegas

Date: 07:30:39 07/26/98

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Hi Bob and Dan:
The reason why GMI are commonly opposed to play compuyters and/or to dismiss
them from the beginning - reason of not so high players is different, of course-
is in the sychic structure of those guys. A chess player of high level is not
just a guy that play ches, but a chess-player and almost -not always, but very
frequently- nothing else. They have commited fully to that, his entire life and
self apreciation depends on that and what is more, they chose a kind of
professions where there is not room for doubts according the strenght of those
commited. That is a kind of very hard, difficult to face way of living. Just
think how it would be if in ANY profession or activity a so precise and definite
kind of clasification would exist. Life is bearable as much as you feel not all
has been lost, that you still have an opoportunity. So if you are not in the
top, you always can blame bad luck, politics or whatever. So you can bear the
fact you are not a winner, the top gun. The french writer Anatole France said
that the fact the french academy once in a while gave a chair to evidently poor
writer was a proof of the wisdom of that organization, as such an always
unfalible one would be unbearable. If the academy gives a chair to a non entity,
said France, then the losers has a good reason to accept his fate as much the
academy has proved beyond doubt his many failures. But in chess there is not
room for that. If you are a 2000 player, you are such without excuse. No room to
bad luck, etc. Now, returning to GMI, people that they live all the time in that
scheme,  to ask them that besides what they actually endures should accept
without complain the arrival of these monster that, risking nothing, can deprive
them of the only thing they have, his pride, his sense of power, maybe is too
much. Each time a high level player play a game, he risk his entire being, his
self, but at least he does so that against a guy that is in the same
predicament. But a computer? What a computer lose if he loses? How could a GMI
that puts his self-steem in his perfomances in a board could sustain it if then
a mere toy can beat it to pieces? I have putted a lot of master against my
programs and thet normally are beaten and is very sad to see how those men got
depresed and then try to deprecate all the business talking of the "silly
machines".
Fernando



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