Hydra vs. Shredder

azaris writes "The powerful computer chess engine Hydra, running on a sixteen-way Linux cluster, is taking on the many times world champion engine Shredder in a match between the two chess super computers in Abu Dhabi, according to ChessBase.com. So far, Hydra is leading by two clear victories." S!: ChessBase also points to the announcement of a "64,000 square meter International Chess City" in Dubai, planned to cost US $2.6 billion, which "will feature 32 buildings designed to mirror the image of a traditional black and white game board."

Comments

Re:The Futue

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>We'll just pit computers against one another, and people won't even play anymore.

Why?

Humans still compete with each other at lifting weights, moving fast, and throwing things. Machines have long since outclassed us at those activities but we still relish the challenge.

Re:The Futue

[jnana]

Silicon-based computers excel at logic. Carbon-based computors excel at pattern-recognition and that whole sphere of massively parallel modes of thinking that one might call intuition.

The best carbon chess players are still about equal with the best silicon chess players, and they sure as hell are not doing that with silicon-type logic (evaluating billions of nodes in a search tree). That implies to me that there's a hell of a lot of intuition, for want of a better word, in chess.