Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 11:58:44 02/02/99
Go up one level in this thread
On February 02, 1999 at 13:53:29, Terry Presgrove wrote: >IBM unveils fastest supercomputer This is marketing puff, IMHO. During these matches, it was very obvious that IBM was trying to use Deep Blue to sell computers. It is an obvious tie-in. People use car races to sell cars, after all, even though the car in the race is mechanically very dissimilar to the one you'd buy from the dealer. After the disassembly of Deep Blue they have continued doing this. They are going to compare every new computer to the one that played against Kasparov. Merely mentioning that match gets a routine new product upgrade announcement mentioned on the radio and in the newspaper. They are not going to put Deep Blue back together. If they put it back together, using a faster computer, and they lose a match, maybe their computer sucks? And if they win, they won on a slower computer already, so who cares? They aren't in this for the science or the chess or the computer chess. No way. The team almost certainly is, but they aren't the ones calling the shots. The public thinks that chess has been conquered by these new powerful *IBM* computers. IBM would be stupid to do anything to undermine this opinion, and from a business point of view they are right to try to capitalize on it. That the opinion doesn't necessarily correspond to reality doesn't enter into it. bruce
This page took 0.01 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.