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Subject: ANSWER to 'Perfect chess and still loses?!

Author: Terry Giles

Date: 23:29:52 06/19/03


The perfect chess-playing machine 'Quantum-Chess' amazingly resigned its first
game after only twenty moves in its match against the current human world
champion Kay Sar. The Japanese GM opened the game with her favourite g4 and
after reaching an interesting and apparently equal position ‘Quantum-Chess'
promptly resigned.

Question: Assuming the machine really can play perfect chess, and Kay Sar (3015
elo) cannot, why did ‘Quantum-Chess’ resign?


ANSWER
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‘Quantum-Chess’ plays perfect chess and as such saw that after Kay Sar’s 20th
move its position was lost (white mates in 47 moves) and it assumed, almost
certainly erroneously, that its human opponent would find the correct
continuation to win the game. Kay Sar had been partly lucky in finding the first
twenty moves of a perfect chess game. If ‘Quantum-Chess’ had been unable to
utilise its opening book, which in this particular opening line was twenty moves
deep, it would have resigned immediately after Kay Sar’s opening move of g4
(white mates in 66 moves).

Note: ‘Quantum-Chess’ as its name implies plays chess by utilising massively
parallel quantum computation and therefore is able to play chess perfectly   ;-)
However lacking as it does any psychological dimension it failed to realise that
its opponent would almost certainly be unable to find the winning continuation
from the resigned position. ‘Quantum-Chess’ should have played the opponent and
not the board.

THERE’S HOPE FOR US ALL!



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