Newsgroups: comp.ai
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!news.sprintlink.net!noc.netcom.net!netcom.com!nagle
From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle)
Subject: Re: Chess "genius"
Message-ID: <nagleD968q8.7tq@netcom.com>
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References: <3psru2$oe0@ruulot.let.ruu.nl> <19950523170130.P.E.Fenton@sp0293.kub.nl>
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 06:01:19 GMT
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Sender: nagle@netcom3.netcom.com

P.E.Fenton@kub.nl  (P.E. FENTON) writes:
>In Article <3psru2$oe0@ruulot.let.ruu.nl> "spaan@ruulot.let.ruu.nl (Martijn Spaan)" says:
>> Last Saturday a program was shown on German television
>> about Kasparov playing a chess computer that for some
>> undiscernable reason was called Genius-something.
>This was the second match between this chess program and Kasparov, the first
>time it beat him 1.5 to 0.5.  This second set of two games was played with
>the computer running faster than the first time (120 mhz pentium).  The
>preperation of Kasparov the second time was reported as being much more
>rigourous after his loss the first time.  

     Actually, the state of the art in computer chess is pretty good.
The best commercial desktop chess machines can trounce anybody who
isn't in the top few hundred chess players worldwide.  (Running on battery
power, even!) The most advanced programs running on specialized hardware 
are playing at the low end of grandmaster level.  The technology isn't
just brute-force search any more, although that is a big part of it.

    "Chess Life" covers this issue now and then.  Current thinking is
that machines and grandmasters will be going back and forth for a while,
because the strategies used are different.  But, as one of the people
who's been playing against machines for about two decades says, "I'm
starting to feel like John Henry going up against the steam hammer".

						John Nagle
