Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 07:00:20 10/19/04
Go up one level in this thread
On October 19, 2004 at 02:56:31, Tony Nichols wrote: > >When a GM plays against a computer in the opening he's actually playing against >other GMs. You could a chess program think for a month and it's never going to >play the first ten moves of the Najdorf! I've never quite understood this argument. If you somehow removed a GMs memory of opening theory and allowed him to think for a month, he will also not play the first ten moves of the Najdorf. GMs play the Najdorf because they know the theory built by the work of hundreds or thousands of players over several decades (or, for several other openings, more than a century). When human players are allowed to stand on the shoulders of giants, why is it not fair to allow computer players the same? Some people argue that it is unfair because the computer has perfect and practically unlimited memory, and can remember all lines ever played in the Najdorf. But on the other hand, human players have other advantages. A GM playing the Najdorf has an enormous amount of knowledge of the plans and the tactical and positional motifs of the opening. He knows where to place the pieces, which pawns to advance, and which pieces to exchange. He has detailed knowledge about the typical endgames resulting from the opening. The computer has none of this knowledge, and has to work everything out on its own from the moment it leaves its opening book. It is true that when computers grow faster and stronger, it might be interesting to play human-computer matches where the computer is handicapped in some way. But it seems ridiculous to me to regard such matches as more "fair" than the traditional format. Computer and human players simply have very different strengths and weaknesses. Taking away some of the computer's strengths while allowing the human to keep all of his does not make the game more fair. Tord
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.