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Men vs. Machines
FFriedel writes "In October classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik is scheduled to play Deep Fritz in Bahrain. Now Garry Kasparov, who lost his title to Kramnik in 2000, but is still ranked as the strongest player in the world, has announced that he will play the computer chess world champion Deep Junior in Jerusalem at almost exactly the same time. Both programs are distributed by ChessBase. In 1997 Kasparov lost his famous match against Deep Blue."
It's a Hitchhiker's Guide reference. In the series by Douglas Adams, there is a computer that called "Deep Thought" that finds the answer to life, the universe, and everything else. (Which is 42). A famous chess playing computer was named Deep Thought. IBM's Deep Blue is a take on that name and IBM's "corporate color" of blue.
this was puglished yesterday in haaretzdaily.com. It has some interesting details like, for example, the track record of Junior, to this date, and that the competition will have a peace-builing slant to it, too.
Sigged!
I don't know if Deep Blue was altered during the match, but I do know that Deep Blue pretty much beat every other grand master on the planet getting to Kasparov. Deep Blue had to fight his way there like any other challenger.
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*beware the cute-bunny virus
So why would you want to actually buy one of these programs? They aren't teaching programs. They aren't for a friendly game against the computer. They aren't open sourced (that I could see) so you can't study the algorithms. They are meant to destroy every human they come in contact with.
Well, Fritz (and other programs) have "analysis" modes, where you can load up a game you played against another person, and it can analyze the game in depth and point out any mistakes or missed opportunities for you. This feature alone makes it worth the $50 they charge you for it.
True, very few people can beat Fritz head-to-head, but it is a good way to strengthen yourself tactically - you make even a small tactical error, and Fritz will exploit it.
Does anyone outside of chess grand masters use these things?
Yes, I do (and I'm a 1200-level player, only been really playing for a few months now). Almost everybody else at my club who uses any sort of computer program (which is the majority or people there) uses Fritz too.
(How many grand masters are there, anyway?)
Several hundred worldwide AFAIK.
I'm a very mediocre chess player myself, and if I want my ass handed to me in chess I'll go down to the local high school club and call them all smelly virgins before starting a game. At least I'll have some face-to-face interaction.
Yeah, well. Computer chess is no substitute for the real thing. Of course, lack of smelly virgins (with the possible exception of yourself) is definitely a benefit.
Even more OT, but just a slight correction: In the Go rating system, after 1 kyu there is 1 dan - 7 dan amateur, then there's a gap of about 2 stones (difference in rating equals the number of handicap stones required to make a fair game), then come the pros, who don't use handicap, but 1 rank difference among pros is about 1/4 of a stone. So beating a pro player is even harder than in the rating system you describe.
Also the level of Go programs is to be taken with a grain of salt, because if you play a lot of games against them, even weaker players will discover the weaknesses of the program and exploit them (often playing unorthodox but still not bad moves does the trick), which always works because the programs don't learn from their mistakes.
For a program to beat a pro player, faster hardware won't be of any use. What's needed is a major breakthrough in AI software technology, which may not happen anytime soon. Also the advantage of brute force looking ahead isn't that great for computers, since professionals routinely read 100 moves ahead (which makes some pro games very hard to understand for a lowly amateur as myself (~12 kyu)).