World Computer Chess Championships Underway

azaris writes "While the FIDE World Championships for human players in Tripoli, Libya are down to the last two contestants, the computers are playing their own 12th World Computer Chess Championship in Ramat-Gan, Israel. How will the open source chess engine Crafty do against the proprietary closed engines? Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"

Comments

Re:USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

"No native players"? You were hoping for Native American players?

In case you haven't heard, the USA is (almost entirely) a nation of IMMIGRANTS.

Glad the Russian-American & Japanese-American players have found a better life here.

Re:A chess posting on slashdot ?

[hunterx11]

Acutally, a closed-source engine has been banned over accusations of copying. I guess with open-source there's no worry :)

Some results

[ninja0]

Some results are at Chessbase.

Crafty managed to draw Shredder, one of the big-name computer programs, in the first round. That makes it tied with a bunch of other programs in the middle of the pack.

Personally, I'm always excited to hear about the progress that has been made by chess engines. Nowadays, the top programs can compete with all of the top humans, without requiring a supercomputer.

No, Intuition is not the key to master-level play

[fw3]

Yes a human chess player has a few neat tools. The primary one is called:

Positional play

Algorithms / heuristics which have attempted to capture this 'intelligent' side of chess players' methodology have uniformly failed and the winning programs continue to primarily rely on simple evaluation of material.

This means that a master-level player has a strong advantage in offering a computer opponent some material in exchange say for superior control of the center of the board.

Advanced chess play has very little to do with 'intuition'. The specific tools that come to bear are:

exhaustive study of openings and endings
solid tactical evaluation (stupid mistakes still lose games)
positional evaluation

generally, for instance it's suicide to allow a game against a machine develop into an 'open' vs a 'closed' position. Tactical evaluation is less effective in closed positions; in open positions the machine's greater depth-search works extremely well.