Doesn’t compute
By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 8:26 AM, January 31, 2010
Posted: 12:51 AM, January 31, 2010
It’s been four years since a top grandmaster dared cross pawns with a strong computer — and it’s not likely to happen again.
Garry Kasparov, who should know, declared the era of Man vs. Machine matches “a thing of the past.”
The former world champion, who famously lost to Deep Blue in 1997, played two more matches against computers, drawing with Deep Junior and X3D Fritz in 2003.
“With my knowledge of computers, I know I will always be able to win a game — and, I believe, a match,” he said after the Junior match, which was supposed to be an annual event.
But Kasparov, who recently bought an Upper West Side penthouse, wrote in the New York Review of Books that the supremacy of computers is “now apparent.”
Actually it’s been apparent for some time.
His Russian rival Vladimir Kramnik was crushed 4-2 by Deep Fritz in 2006 and Michael Adams of Britain only managed one draw in six games with Hydra in 2005.
Since then there’s been little sponsorship interest in what would certainly be another lopsided embarrassment for humanity.
Source: http://www.nypost.com
Carlsen can beat any computer.
Kasparov and Kramnik werent playing their best chess in those matches,we all remember Kramniks mate in one blunder.So those matches didnt prove anything.
Hydra is one bad mo-fo.
I don’t understand why the issue of CPU vs. brain power is always presented as some sort of battle for the dignity of human intellectual capacity. The computers were made by humans in the first place, and as long as the same computer which plays chess at a 3000+ level, can’t have an interesting philosophical dialogue in the post game analysis, drawing on influences beyond the 64 squares, it is still an autistic machine with only great power of doing if/then (0,1)calculations within the 64 squares. I find it more interesting how humans, with our vast capacity for all sorts of functions, can actually maintain a focus so deep as to actually draw these retarded steel aspergers 😀
Since then there’s been little sponsorship interest in what would certainly be another lopsided embarrassment for humanity.
It wouldn’t be an embarrassment, if humanity in its short-sightedness didn’t claim for years (at the early days of the computers) that computers will never beat masters, later grandmasters, later the world champion. Because (went the explanation) humans have a “magic foresight” of some sort in chess, which computers will never have. These claims were made at those days when computers could calculate 4-5 moves ahead. Obviously humans could do better at the time. As CPU speeds, program qualities improved, computers were able to calculate more and more moves ahead, finally overpowering that “magic foresight” which was still nothing more than to calculate ahead of time for a better move.
I was following Corus with Fritz 11, in a single CPU mode (2.66 GHZ home computer). Not once, not even once any of the top chess players contradicted Fritz 11’s best move prediction (and ended up winning).
The embarrassment doesn’t belong of overestimating the chess players, but underestimating the speed of computer development. It was just a matter of time, not an if, but a when.