Author: martin fierz
Date: 18:00:23 05/18/02
Go up one level in this thread
On May 18, 2002 at 07:48:54, Robert Henry Durrett wrote: >On May 17, 2002 at 21:08:20, martin fierz wrote: > >>On May 17, 2002 at 18:51:47, Robert Henry Durrett wrote: >> >>>I hope you will forgive me if I lack diplomacy. I never was good at that. >>> >>>It was not I who reopened an old can of worms. It was GM Ilya Smirin. >>> >>>The essence of my recent posts is to say that I was hoping that his observations >>>about how the chess engines performed would be discussed here. So far, nothing. >>> I was merely trying to prompt someone to address the GM's concerns. >> >>there is a good reason that there is no response to smirin's statements: what he >>said is just common knowledge here. if i remember right, it was about this: >>- computers are great in open positions >>- computers are weak in closed positions >>- computers have no long-range planning capabilities. >>this is *really old* stuff! it has been this way all the time, and will probably >>be this way for a long time to come... >> >>aloha >> martin > >Thanks, Martin, for a courteous, straightforward and honest answer to my >question. Your comments that "this is common knowledge here" and "this is >*really old* stuff" have a ring of truth about them. They certainly explain why >noone addressed Smirin's observations about the chess engine he was playing >against. > >I have been going thru the archived files in search of earlier discussions of >this topic and have not yet found them. I am still looking. If you remember >any of that, I would appreciate your help in locating them. > >If the files I'm looking for are REALLY old, then one must wonder whether or not >there has been any recent progress made in finding the solutions to these >"really old" technical problems. But perhaps people will not present their new >stuff here because they are already "burned out" on this topic. hmm, i don't really know where to look for that - but the fact that comps play bad in closed positions can be seen in all comp-GM matches, there are games like van Wely - fritz SSS (and it's cousin, smirin-shredder), van wely - rebel which demonstrate this. on the other side, comps being strong in open positions there are lots of examples, maybe some famous ones are deep blue - kasparov game one of the first match, game six of the second match. or rebel - van wely game 3. i think that the general problem with computer chess & planning is just where it was 10 years ago. however, today the machines are so fast that the programs can look ahead far enough to see trouble much earlier and so avoid many things they could not 10 years ago. in another 10 years, computers will be even much faster and many problems that they cannot solve today will disappear. i think other things like the "fortress" concept which was demonstrated beautifully in the game smirin-hiarcs are pretty far off. it's also interesting to read the comments to the game, there is this guy "thevish" who makes comments to the ending - they are always "bishop here, knight there and it's a fortress". thevish is of course anand, and you can see from his comments that this concept is very important to a human when looking at such a position. aloha martin
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