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23-Year-Old Chess Grandmaster Whips Bill Gates In 71 Seconds
MojoKid writes "There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind. Sure, he dropped out of Harvard College, but he got accepted into the elite institution of higher learning in the first place. Leading into his college career, Gates scored 1,590 out of 1,600 on the SAT. The rest is history — he went on to co-found Microsoft, built a net worth that's in the billions ($76.8 billion at last count), and now spends his time on his philanthropic efforts. Regardless, it took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster" Chess player since the age of 13 and new world Chess champion, just 71 seconds to defeat Gates in a friendly game of Chess on a Norwegian television show. It takes longer to heat up a cup of water in the microwave."
No, he's not. Give Fritz a powerful enough CPU and 8GB of RAM to hold opening/endgame tables, and it could beat any human player. The days where humans could beat computers at chess are long gone. Let alone the super-engines like Rybka or Houdini, the ones that GMs use (on extreme hardware) to prepare for matches. The Elo rating of engines has long since passed the 3260, while even the best (Kasparov at his peak) never breached 2860; a 400 Elo rating difference is more or less insurmountable (that rating difference means that statistically, you'll eke out a draw every hundred games, and lose the other ninety-nine).
Don't get me wrong, I think Carlsen will become the greatest human to ever play the game, but chess engines have become (conservatively) over a million times more powerful since the landmark victory of Deep Blue against Kasparov, if you combine hardware and software advances. What then shocked the world is nowadays commonplace.
Chess engines are dumb. Without opening books and endgame tables they're worth jack shit.
Now the day someone comes up with a chess engines that doesn't need opening books and endgame tables to beat a human chess player that is a day worth remembering.