Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Great Result for Fritz and puts to rest some questions.

Author: Alastair Scott

Date: 13:48:01 10/19/02

Go up one level in this thread


On October 19, 2002 at 14:48:26, Russell Reagan wrote:

>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"?

Indeed, but endgame tablebases are a different matter; the winning sequences are
often so far beyond the capabilities of the human mind, and are quite often  so
counter-intuitive (as some of John Nunn's researches have found, for example), I
would have real qualms about using them in a human-computer match.

Your argument is good but I feel that, with tablebases, the issues of fairness
raised with respect to opening books are so enormously magnified they can't be
ignored.

Alastair



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.