Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:48:26 10/19/02
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On October 19, 2002 at 14:00:03, Dana Turnmire wrote: >True but to make it truly fair shouldn't a GM be allowed access to an opening >book also? The computer is allowed to play it perfectly because it written down >and the computer is sitting there reading from its book whereas the human must >rely strictly on memory. The computer is using it's memory too. The computer can just "remember" a lot more, and remembers everything perfectly. Remember, a hard disk is just another form of memory. It's just slower than RAM. If you arne't allowed to look up things from the hard drive, then you shouldn't be allowed to look up things in RAM either, in which case computer chess would cease to exist. It seems like you're saying that books shouldn't be allowed just because the computer can "remember" better than humans. So we should handicap computers to make it "fair"? That doens't sound "fair" to me. The computers can also look at a lot more positions than humans. Should we restrict computers to 1 move per second to make it "fair"? If you want to talk about fairness, think about it from the computer's point of view, as if the computer were another person with extraordinary abilities. Do you think that would be fair to say, "you aren't allowed to memorize anything, and you can't think faster than 3 moves per second" to a human? If not, why is it ok to say the same thing to a computer? You seem to be after fairness, but this is not fair. You're trying to penalize the computer because it's better at some things than humans are. The computer can take advantage of what humans have done, such as making use of opening books made by humans, but humans can also take advantage of what computers have done, such as learning better endgame strategies based on the endgame tablebases. If a human is able to remember every major known opening many moves deep, that human would no doubt do that if they were interested in being a top chess player, but for some reason this isn't ok for a computer to do. Why? >In other words it's like going to a tournament and >even though both players have studied the opening only one player is allowed to >actually use a manual to play with which allows for perfect opening play. No one ever said that an opening book is perfect. Once chess is solved it will likely eliminate many of the "playable" openings, assuming there are some forced wins, or at least some "almost" forced wins. Russell
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