Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 11:30:30 10/13/99
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> With Hsu's new chips at ten times faster, and with ten times as many of > them on a ten times faster RS/6000 with ten times as much memory and a > giant striped disk farm holding the complete set of 6 piece tablebase files... > > Now think... Don't you think *that* would be fun to watch? Well, say a factor 100 is gained in speed. That would be at most gain of 3-4 plies in depth. Given that DB already computes the near term combinations better than GK, and GK has better planning and can see long term consequences better, the 3-4 plies will, of course increase the percentage of tactical shots which exists in a position, which are seen by DB and missed by GK, but the question is whether that figure isn't already nearly maxed out with the existent hardware (i.e. if the3 current DB already saw 99.9% of near term existent tactial shots, which missed by GK, and the 100xDB sees 99.999% it isn't much of a difference). That is, the strenghtening DB in that capability in which it was already much stronger than GK (or any human), it won't necessarily improve perceptibly its results over GK. By a more careful choice of openings and positions he enters, GK (or other human champions) could easily offset such minor adjustment in the percentage due to hardware speedups on the top of essentially brute force searcher. In checkers, for example, Tinsley vs program Chinook, won the match by seeing plans 35-40 plies long, which were far beyond Chinook (which could see around 20 plies ahead). Speeding up Chinook 100 or 1000 times wouldn't have made much difference, since Chinook still couldn't see (not even remotely) what Tinsley could. One should also consider that if the computer-human chess competition gains in importance (among the top chess players), along with the sufficient incentives for the humans to win, the anticomputer strategy will evolve as well. Currently that area of chess theory is quite undeveloped (a handful of outdated guidlines, proposed by isolated individuals who found themselves on the spot on few occasions), but given the right incentives to the professional chess community, it could develop fast and set the computers back another few decades or longer. The top human player isn't necessarily the best person to advance such theory (I'd guess that Karpov or Fischer would do better against programs than Kasparov or Anand). In few years we may have a human champion (or two) and an anti-computer champion (just as postal chess is its own separate world).
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