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Chess - 2070 CPUs vs 1 GM

Posted by timothy on from the hitting-all-the-bases dept.

jvarsoke writes "ChessBrain.net broke the world's record for 'largest number of distributed computers used to play a single game' by holding a chess match between Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate). 2070 CPU's from 56 countries aided Black by running the chess program Beowulf, including a couple of University clusters. Their supernode ran Linux, and MySQL. The game was relayed by FICS. Results can be viewed here(1) and here(2)."

2 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Understanding vs. Processing by vontrotsky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We're getting closer and closer to the days when humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal. We haven't be able to compete with computers at arithmetic for half a century and this doesn't bother anyone.

    Losing to computers in chess will be like losing to calculators in a addition match. People and computers aren't really in competition. They do very different things.

  2. Results by Stalyx · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "The game lasted several hours before resulting in a draw. Chess Grandmaster Peter Nielsen commented that he had set several traps for ChessBrain which computers normally fall for... but was surprised that ChessBrain refused them! "

    So what does this tell us? Nothing really, however it would be interesting how the computer will perform in a 5 match series.

    Although I still think the GM would win handily.