Author: Richard D. Boltuck
Date: 02:23:45 09/30/02
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These were really exciting games, wild play, and excellent, beautiful chess. Certainly UBI should be ecstatic. I'm sure Larry, as a human, suffered from the time controls combined with the brutal pace of 2 games a day -- 6 or 7 hours of chess a day against a computer would be enough to exhaust anyone! But as John said, Larry didn't play anti-computer chess -- he was just himself, playing 19th century creative attacking chess with speculative sacs (which when defended against well are proven to be unsound, i.e., indistinguishable from a blunder). That's a style that, when executed well, has always achieved against the vast majority of players, and has propelled Larry to the top ranks of the game (and the U.S. championship). But we also know from the slow, small-advantage positional play developed by the "Soviet School" in the 20th century that, when implemented by a small elite of exceptional players, positional play can control and defeat wild attacking chess. I think CM9K demonstrated in its games with Larry that it can defend tenaciously against speculative attacks and sacs and recover through small positional steps to win or draw. This is certainly beyond the tactical prowess alone that for so long characterized most strong programs. That's why Kasparov and Kramnik might be better suited to defeat these programs (but we shall see in the coming months). In any event, CM9K plays true GM chess (even if not at ELO 2800). UBI has proven its point. It will be interesting to see how it ranks against Fritz, Crafty and the others in the new Swedish list. It plainly deserves more respect than it's received in the past.
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