Author: Uwe Meißner
Date: 02:19:33 09/11/03
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On September 11, 2003 at 04:43:54, Dana Turnmire wrote: >From "The Mammouth Book of Chess" page 433. > >"...the human uses the computer to check over analysis he has done, and to reach >a verdict on random tactics. It's a tool. As computers get better and better, >such occurrances as this (finding mate in 9 etc.) will become more common, and >both players will be guided away from such perils by their machines, until >eventually there is no way out for one side or the other. Since so many of the >moves were chosen by excluding moves for reasons other than human preference, it >will become impossible for a player to explain why he won a game, or for the >loser to understand why he lost. They can perhaps point to the strategy they >employed, but it will really have been some random assisted tactical >implementations of the two players' strategies that have decided matters. >Looking at it in terms of the humans versus computers discussion, for a while >the game will have been drifting around inside the 20% of positions in which >humans are better than computers, or the 60% no-man's land where it isn't clear >who handles the position better. However, should the game drift into the 20% of >positions that computers handle far better than humans, then that is the end of >the human involvement in the game. The two computers are effectively battling >it out from then on." > >"Obviously, as the percentages get slanted more in favour of the computers, the >point at which it is the two computers locked in battle will become more >frequent, and occur earlier in the game." > >"Perhaps a ban on the use of computers in championship events could to some >extent be enforced by requiring players to be able to explain, if called upon by >the official bodies, how they happened to find any really strong >counter-intuitive moves. This would be the equivalent of the drug test in >athletics." Interesting stuff, but the context is not quite clear to me. Are they speaking about correspondence chess or some sort of Advanced Chess a la Kasparow? I think good players will always be able to explain post mortem what did happen on the board; it's only a matter of time and work. Nevertheless there are some tricky endings (you can find in tablebases), that have 100-200 moves, where it seems impossible to explain the meaning of each single move. But also this is only a matter of time and motivation. In natural sciences there are much more complicated questions, which already have been solved even without computers. > Uwe
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