I was beginning to wonder if anybody was going to mention Go. I personally feel that Go is a much better game to judge computer AI by because it requires more creativity. You can't win at go by reading through every possible combination - there are just too many of them. A player must be creative and intuitive as well as technically minded and able to read through variations several moves ahead.
Just to put things into perspective: This article is about the debate over whether computer chess is really on the level of the Grand Masters yet or not. In the Go world, this question is absurd. A reasonably strong professional (not even necessarily a proven title holder) can give a handicap of well over 9 stones (this is approximately equivalent to a 9 rank difference in strength - an enourmous difference in Go) to the leading computer go programs, and demolish everything on the board.
I find Webmaster in a Nutshell to be indespensible. It covers HTML, CSS, XML, PERL, CGI, PHP, and Apache Administration. This book is the most beat up, and well used on my shell, and is by far the best investment I have made in computer/programming reference books.
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I was beginning to wonder if anybody was going to mention Go. I personally feel that Go is a much better game to judge computer AI by because it requires more creativity. You can't win at go by reading through every possible combination - there are just too many of them. A player must be creative and intuitive as well as technically minded and able to read through variations several moves ahead.
Just to put things into perspective: This article is about the debate over whether computer chess is really on the level of the Grand Masters yet or not. In the Go world, this question is absurd. A reasonably strong professional (not even necessarily a proven title holder) can give a handicap of well over 9 stones (this is approximately equivalent to a 9 rank difference in strength - an enourmous difference in Go) to the leading computer go programs, and demolish everything on the board.
I find Webmaster in a Nutshell to be indespensible. It covers HTML, CSS, XML, PERL, CGI, PHP, and Apache Administration. This book is the most beat up, and well used on my shell, and is by far the best investment I have made in computer/programming reference books.