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Subject: What Did The Match Referees Do?

Author: Graham Laight

Date: 05:34:21 01/20/00

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Suppose that IBM could not get DB to work, so they decided to put a humming
black box in the Equitable building, and transmit the moves in from outside. The
moves would have been chosen by a team of IMs working with other chess
computers.

Would the match referees have picked this up?

As I understand it, there was only 1 referee, and he couldn't have been
everywhere all the time. Was there even a referee in the IBM team room?

Let me state for the record that I do not believe that, in reality, IBM cheated.

-g

On January 18, 2000 at 21:51:54, Dann Corbit wrote:

>Let's suppose the worst.  IBM decided to cheat.  Now, folks like Anand and
>Karpov are not going to risk a lifetime ban by doing something illegal.  So it
>would pretty much have to be a lower-eschelon player.  [Well, they could have
>crammed RJF into that box, but he would have been deathly afraid of a sinister
>plot, I'm afraid -- so I think we can rule that out also].
>
>So what are we left with?  How do you cheat against the world's best player (by
>a landslide?)???
>
>You have some lower level GM who can be tempted and yet will *never* spill the
>beans (hmm -- it seems it would take millions to do that, but what if he put the
>money in a Swiss bank account and decided to write a book...  Sounds a bit risky
>doesn't it)
>
>In short the cheater theories are idiotic.  It does not work.  Even if you could
>somehow pull it off, you would be sneaking in some high school track star to run
>against Michael Johnson.  And then taking the ENORMOUS risk that for the rest of
>his life, he would keep his mouth shut.
>
>It's ludicrous.  Insanely, bizarre.  I can't imagine how such a foolish
>expression can even escape the lips of any intelligent, thinking person.
>
>But forget all that, and suppose that you somehow manage to have a very clever
>human (maybe we get a 2600GM who hates GK's intestines) to participate.  The
>human says "Rxb2" and the computer says "a4."  Whom do you believe?  The GM
>can't outplay Kasparov -- we already know that.
>
>I will admit that having a super-GM in cahoots with Deep Blue *would* make a
>stronger pair -- if you had a few months to form a workable system and a few
>hundred games.  But the risk is so enormous that only a great fool would believe
>an image conscious company like IBM would try a foolhardy thing like that.
>
>In short, I lose respect for any person who says they believe in that hokey
>"conspiracy" theory.



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