Kramnik Ties Fritz; Machines Not Yet Our Masters

Maltov writes "World Chess Champion V. Kramnik ties his match against the software Fritz. Details here. You can also check out a picture gallery and a short history of computer chess."

Comments

comparing apples to oranges

[jacquesm]

There was a time when people put a lot of weight on a computer being able to play a high level of chess, but that was before the advent of a strategy that is best characterised as massive parallel brute force solution of a game with a very large tree of possible moves.

Nowadays, there really is very little point. You are comparing apples to oranges when you allow the one party a nearly infinite budget of cycles and power and allow the other party 18 cycles per second on a biological processor that is running on a couple of oranges for a whole games' worth of computation.

I we want to make this kind of competition interesting again I think there really should be limits on the power and cycle budget of the machine involved in order to get back to the essence of the whole game theory thing, which is not going flat out for the maximum number of ply you can look ahead but to try to quantify a strategic advantage.

Unfortunately that will not make for interesting press releases.

To me the current 'matches' look a little bit like sledgehammers being used to crack nuts. It does work, but there is no real output. All this stuff proves is that if you throw enough money at a problem you can force the outcome of something as trivial as a game of chess.

It does not advance the state of the art in computing at all.

It's not Man vs. Machine...

[Will_Malverson]

...It's Man vs. Nature.

Kramnik and Kasparov are the best chess players that nature can produce. Meanwhile, humans have built Fritz and Deep Blue. We aren't in the process of losing to machines. We're in the process of beating nature.