Author: Zheng Zhixian
Date: 00:37:39 09/10/05
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On September 09, 2005 at 22:56:07, Dan Honeycutt wrote: >Hi Fernando > >We are either (as you wish) close to, at, or beyond the point where the best >chess players are computers. For human use, I agree with you that features more >than engine strength will be most important in the future. But the engines will >continue to battle as there will always be an interest in knowing who is -the- >best. Indeed. This is CCC of course, where the fascination is with computer strength for its own sake. Whether it is for bragging rights of owning the strongest, the belief that stronger engine leads to better analysis, or plain curiosity, people are interested in chess engine strength not just as a sparring partner. Fernando despite being one of the original members seems to forget that even at the dawn of CCC, computer programs on PC were already at least IM strength, and more than sufficient for most players, and that even 5 years ago, were too strong for 99.9% of players and yet, people wanted to know which was the strongest. People wanted to know their "real rating", even though most of them didn't have a prayer against them. Clearly, this revolution against engine strength should have happened years ago if it was a matter of waiting for a program to become stronger than the human for the sake of playing Just because today we have a somewhat temporary and rare situation where it's hard to tell who is king of the hill (and one or two of the contenders are freeware), does not mean that people will suddenly lose interest in who's is the strongest. Mig points out that the existence of the plenty strong crafty in the past did not interfere with success of Fritz. I rather see it this way. The fact that Crafty is/was plenty strong in the past, still did not prevent many people from asking if Fritz was stronger than crafty and by how much :) It's not just among the computer chess freaks, the fascination of owning the strongest chess program out there is fairly universal. I suspect this will never change until the game is almost fully played out and chess engines approach optimal play (most games are draws or wins for one color)
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