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Subject: The Brute and the Beast [by GM Hans Ree] ChessCafe.com

Author: José Antônio Fabiano Mendes

Date: 06:45:28 08/27/03


 Please see ==> http://www.chesscafe.com/hans/hans.htm

Early this month the computer Shredder 7 won a grandmaster tournament in
Argentina with a score of 8½ out of 10 and a TPR of 2752. An even stronger
tournament in the German town Lippstadt was won about a week ago by Brutus, a
program named by its creator, the Austrian computer scientist Chrilly Donninger,
after one of the murderers of Julius Caesar.

Shredder, Brutus - these computer designers do not seem to be men of peace. The
aggressive names they give to their darlings bring to mind Evelyn Waugh's fine
novel Scoop, in which the newspapers The Daily Brute and The Daily Beast were
battling brutally and beastly for the public's favor.

I used to play in some man-against-computer tournaments in Holland and I was
often shocked by the strong emotional involvement of the computer operators with
their playthings. In comparison, the human players seemed models of civilised
aloofness.

But we have to admit that the killer instinct of the computer people is not only
reflected in the names of their programs, but also in their play. If these TPR's
of Brutus and Shredder turn out to be repeatable and represent a stable level,
it would mean that they would take fourth and fifth place on the world ranking
list, only preceded by Kasparov, Kramnik and Anand.




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