Author: Jeroen van Dorp
Date: 06:43:50 02/10/03
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On February 10, 2003 at 09:27:33, Graham Laight wrote: >OK - thankyou for those platitudes. If you don't like my opinion, feel free to say so, but there's no need to be condescending. > >Now - if I may be permitted, I'd like to ask you two short questions: > >1. Are you in favour of changing the rules for making or accepting draws in Man >v Machine games? > >2. Do you think that those of us who are will get our way without expressing our >displeasure loudly? How exactly? "If the drawing rules don't change I won't ever buy Deep Junior again" ? Has it occured to you that in a match a lost game can influence the rest of one's play? Has the thought come up that losing a game against DJ has had a profound influence on Kasparov? Could he be human after all, and have been weakened by the blow? You all seem so *sure* of everything. *Everyone* here is so sure that Kasparov took the easy way out. I'm not so sure. A computer has no emotions, a human has. Kasparov has other calculation skills, and they're affected by emotions. Deep Junior showed itself a formidable opponent, on par with the strongest chess players in this world. On just a PC - no supercomputer like Deep Blue. I think it's an impressive demonstration of what chess programmers can do on current software, and certainly no reason to dismiss their achievements in this way. All I read here is people who hype out over a coming man vs. machine match and end up with being disgruntled because it didn't go the way they hyped about it. Is that a problem of the match, or of those people? Dee Junior's achievement is impressive, as are all performances or modern chess software. In 1985 Kasparov wrote in the foreword to the manual of my then brand new stand alone chess computers that for short nobody thought that chess computers could be a serious opponent against humans, but nowadays they have become "a serious opponent *up to club player level*". Seventeen years later no one doubts that they are able to play on par with IGM's. Not always - as ofter IGM's don't play on par with their own strongest games. Maybe Kasparov didn't take the risk of losing again, and became overcautious. To say that this behaviour is a disgrace and obviously suggesting this is a bad -commercial- setup or plain cheating is quite questionable. Some of the old FIDE WC matches were a disgrace to courtesy and sportmanship, but were exciting after all. Some weren't, and were just plain dull. A match is something else than a single game. It could just be bad match strategy by Kasparov. It *has* been done before. Better rules are always *better*. Problem is that we only know they're better *afterwards. J.
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