Author: KarinsDad
Date: 12:36:58 03/26/99
Ok, before I get started, this is not a message about the recent controversy on cheating. If you want to talk about that, please respond to one of the other threads or create your own. This thread is about knowing your opponent. Please take a deep breathe and put a little thought into your response before answering. Do not take your first gut feel, but take a step back and try to look at this objectively. When we play in a tournament, we often see an opponent that we know very little about. If we haven't seen or heard about this person before, we know that they are human, we have an idea on their age, and we probably know their rating. There is not much more we know. However, we sit down and play this person regardless of which opening they use or how strong they are. The idea is to have fun and/or compete and/or whatever else rocks your boat about playing in a chess tournament. However, when we go to a chess server, we do not see our opponent. We see the time it takes our opponent to move and we see which moves are made. Occasionally, we do a tell to our opponent and he tells back. But the users of a chess server (or at least the administrators) feel that it is important to segregate humans from computers. Why is that? Do the computers not also have ratings based on different speeds? Do they not also follow the same rules of the game? What portion of the human condition drives us to keep these two sets of contestants apart? Are we so afraid of losing that we think it important to know that our opponent will make few tactical mistakes? Are we really so concerned that a program can respond nearly instantaneously and a human cannot? Do we really want to limit the style of play of the opponent by knowing whether it is silicon based or carbon based ahead of time? Why is all of this so important? I started this thread to discuss this element of the human/computer chess condition. Due to the recent cheating controversy, I could see where this set of questions could push some people's buttons, so if it does this for you and you do not wish to discuss this rationally, please do not respond as I am going to restrain myself from getting into a shouting match this time. Thanks :) KarinsDad :)
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