Humans Hold Off the Machines... For Now

Murr writes "The six game match between Gary Kasparov and the Deep Junior program ended in a draw today. Kasparov won game 1 and lost game 3 to a blunder, while the other 4 games were drawn. While the quality of play was not outstanding, after the recent matches of Kramnik and Kasparov against commercial programs running on (high end) commodity hardware, it's becoming apparent that chess programs are getting quite competitive with top human players."

Comments

Kasparov played cautiously...

[$$$$$exyGal]

I've been keeping track of those games, and what I found most amazing was that Kasparov played so cautiously. If the last game he played would have been against a human player (who played the same moves), I don't think he would have accepted the draw. It seems he accepted the draw because he was psychologically spent, especially when thinking of his loss to Deep Blue several years ago.

--naked

Re:Why did he offer a draw?

[tapin]

The post-match interview explained this a bit -- basically, Kasparov psyched himself out in that fifteen minutes, trying to determine if the rook sacrifice was the blunder that would cost him the match, since Junior can capitalize on mistakes better than a human can (or so Kasparov claimed).

Even though he was in a much stronger position, he was spent; worrying about whether the next move would be the move that cost him the match, and made him the two-time world-champion loser-of-a-major-computer-match.

He agreed to a draw a few moves later once Junior et al realized they were in an extremely weak position.

Seems to me it was a pretty wussy way to end it. Junior got lucky. If you're up five runs in the fourth, you still don't pray for rain even if the other team's got a monster closer.

Re:Kasprov chickened out

[los furtive]

Surely a chess computer is only as good as the person who programmed it?

That's a rather short sighted view. By your equation, Kasparov could have played the programmer, rather than the computer, and the outcome would have been similar. And who is to say that the computer doesn't have the ability to play mind games...if there are 10 ways to win the match based on the current layout, who is to say the computer will take the path with the least amount of moves? Who is to say it will always take Kasparov's bait.

Re:Quality of play

[Scarblac]

"While the quality of play was not outstanding"

Just what are we comparing this to?

Kasparov's own standards. Especially the mistake he made that made him lose one game, as well as the way he was surprised in the opening in game 5, are examples of Kasparov playing below his very best level.

The cliche answer would be to say that Kasparov isn't as good against computers because he can't use his intimidating presence, and he has to be more careful than usual because a computer's style is a good fit to defend against Kasparov's attacks.

On the other hand, Kramnik's cliched image is the exact opposite, and he also drew a computer, so whatever :-)