Author: Stephen Ham
Date: 08:15:37 05/23/03
Go up one level in this thread
On May 23, 2003 at 04:59:53, Angelo Ciavarella wrote: >In response to my question as to whether the champion CC players can outperform >computers,FM Tom Brownscome of the U.S. Chess Federation said that most people >believe that the world's best CC players are better at CC than the current best >computers.He also said that most top-level analysis is done by master-level >players working with computers. Dear Angelo, Clearly this is a topic of interest to you, given your repeated posts. As a dedicated Correspondence Chess player myself, I have some interest in this matter as well. Thanks for your interest. Indeed, as of the present time, I think that most human CC players do believe that the very top CC players, playing without move generating chess engines, are superior to the best chess engines in CC. Personally, I think they're wrong. Before I try to state my case, please allow me to provide some perspective for you. I tried to test this myself, since my rating hovers around ICCF-2500. So in December 1999, I played four CC games versus the top rated chess engines of that time, Fritz 6a and Nimzo 7.32. They were assisted by one of the fastest computers of that day. I played without any computer aid. See below for the match conditions and the result. http://www.correspondencechess.com/campbell/ham/ham.htm In hindsight, in order to try to entertain the masses, I hurt my prospects. I'm not making escuses...I lost fairly. However, I moved rapidly, at the rate of approximately 1-move/day, and also published my notes live (just annotating the games took a lot of time). Also, my only time for analysis was after my family went to bed, so during the late night hours, I was already fatigued. I had an advantage in 3 of the 4 games, but failed to win a single game. Why? Human error. Machines just don't make the mistakes that we mortals do. Alsthough insuffucient games were played from which to draw any conclusions, I must say that I was shocked at how difficult it is to defeat the silicon monsters. For the record, I did not play in anti-computer style, since the point of the experiment was for me to play as I would against a human. After all, in CC these days, we never know who/what our opponents are! My point though is that since late 1999, there have been large gains in chess engine strength and hardware speed. Also, I'm not anywhere near being considered one of the "best" CC players. Maybe someday...;-) Since then, Uri Blass has won the Israeli CC championship using only chess engines to generate his moves. Uri selected moves generated by a number of different engines, so there was some indirect human interevention. Still, the point being that the games were won strictly by chess engine moves. Then, Gandolf 5.0 challenged 4 very strong CC masters (including Kenneth Frey, rated around 2600, thus one of the highest rated CC players in the world) to a match of 1-game apiece. Gandolf isn't even considered to be a top-rated engine. The result - 4 long draws. More details can be found here. http://www.rebel.nl/emailchess/index.htm Conclusion: While insufficient evidence is available from which to draw conclusions, I see no reason to believe that the best unaided humans are demonstrably superior to chess engines in CC. Yet another example is Kasparov versus the World. While the World team had several young OTB masters helping to find candidate moves, the actual moves played were selected by The World players, many (most?) of whom used chess engines. Kasparov was fortunate not to lose that game. We humans, with our egos fully intact, find it difficult to accept and admit that chess engines are at least as strong as our best humans. That's why we'll continue to read claims that human CC skils are superior to silicon. But I agree with Uri Blass - if a strong chess engine with a fast computer is allowed to calculate for 24-hours/move, then it has excellent chanes for victory against the best humans. I accept that my skills are at least matched by a machine. Still, I enjoy playing correspondence chess without any machine assistance in generating my moves. After all, why do we play chess at all if we don't expect to stimulate our own minds from the competition? So Angelo, I hope to see you playing CC some day...hopefully without any machine assistance too. That's my thoughts. What are yours? All the best, Stephen
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.