Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 09:43:17 03/06/04
Go up one level in this thread
On March 06, 2004 at 11:35:52, Albert Silver wrote: >I saw this funny article at the Chessbase site, which showed how absurdly >extreme, online server playing can get. > >http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1511 > >By Steve Lopez > >"the majority of my questions were coming from people who say they are playing >no chess themselves, but are instead interested in ways to "soup up" their >computers so that it'll beat everyone else's computer online. A couple of these >folks have even confessed that they don't even know how to play chess -- they're >just interested in the "competition" of their hardware against everyone else's >hardware. A few aren't even sure how to use Windows -- some have bought their >first-ever computer just to get in on the "fun". " I saw this issue in the early days of ICC - so from the beginning of chess playing robots, we had this niche of computer chess followers who do not play chess but were more interested in the computers playing chess and for some this evolved in the "one-up manship" of getting the fastest hardware. In fact this was even discussed as far back 1997. http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Chessica+Lombardy+Hyatt+group:rec.games.chess.computer&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=rec.games.chess.computer&selm=494nq6%24eoo%40pelham.cis.uab.edu&rnum=1 Who knows - Chessbase may be selling more programs to this niche than to chess players. Personally, I did more interested in chess when "chess computers" became available - imo, chess seems to be the perfect game for computers. Chess has wide spread appeal and is simple enough to play - but still a difficult game for computers to "solve" (we are not their yet). I have used to have arguments with my AT&T enginneer uncle who said (in 1980) chess would be solved by the year 2000 by computers - and I said "no way" back then. The number of uniques chess positions is roughly equiavalent to the number of atoms on earth - 10^50 or so - give or take a few zeros. Let's say a new computer - call it Super Duper Deep Blue calculates 1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) nodes per second, it still take 3,170,979,198,376,458,650,431,253,170,979 years to calculate. In comparision, our universe is estimated to be only 10 to 20 billion years old (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/age_universe_030103.html)) So we have a ways to go yet.
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