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Subject: Computer chess & Fairy tales about *Chess*

Author: Rolf Tueschen

Date: 03:45:59 10/07/02


As always let me make some short and sharp remarks.

Computer chess is the simulation of chess. While the opening moves and the last
technical endings can be played with perfection, the simulation is still far
from its optimum in the middle game.

What Vladimir Kramnik has shown with his masterpiece, the second game, is the
unpleasant truth, we should never forget. Machines have no understanding for the
beauties of chess. Either they play with perfection, because the solution is
already there,or they play like a newborn kid.

The confusing of a training tool with a genuine chess player is the reason for
the speechless amazement of many computer chess lovers. But would they be as
astonished if I would present a "philosopher" with the implementation of the
complete Encyclopedia Britannica and tried to enrol "him" in Harvard or in the
peace conferences at the Lake of Geneva?

If you are absolutely determined to participate in human chess, although the
mainpart of chess is far from being solved, you must not be surprised if a good
human chess master is reveiling the nature of the whole fantasies from time to
time.

Because you can fool chess amateurs with the mere superiority of complete
opening dictionaries, you can also fool chess masters from time to time, if they
go for some as-if in the 19th century excursions into the land of combinations,
but you won't be able to always fool the best chess thinkers, or let me better
say chess artists. Because they don't need bad books or certain ideosyncratic
weaknesses of the machines, because they feel and understand the myst of the
imperfect simulation and then sure they have the necessary technique for a
challenge over the whole game, and not only some isolated parts amateurs are
familiar with.

This is the explanation for the actual situation of computer chess with all the
problems the programmers of the super computer software already had in the 80's
until DB2 in 1997. As I predicted since 1997, the human chess masters have
understood the message of the old trick with the traditional secrecy. Because
without a feeling for the "architecture" of someone's "chess" there is no way to
prove the human superiority in five or eight games. But if you have it, then one
or two games are well sufficient. As Kramnik proved yesterday.

(Please nobody should feel offended - personally. Those who never dreamed in the
categories of the hyperboles of PR were no target of the 'mathematical' proof.)


Rolf Tueschen



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