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10:28:00 AM EST
Hearing Quiet house. Big party last night. People still sleeping.
Crunching Numbers
Not to sound cranky about this, but why do people still get excited about chess games between humans and computers? The current match-up against Garry Kasparov and X3D Fritz (his computer challenger, or at least one would hope with a name like that) is being covered by the world media, several years after the first grand master-level battle between humans and machines.
Chess has a reputation of being the intellectual's game, but at this point in time, it's pretty clear computers do a fair job of the game simply through brute processing of moves -- the need for intuition and strategy takes a backseat to the ability to look through a database of "appropriate" moves. And of course, computers are getting better at this stuff, too, so it seems unlikely over the long haul that humans are going to reclaim the "chess master" title from computers.
What I would like to see, however, is the results of computers playing more complex games against humans. What happens when you stack a computer against human in Monopoly, for example? Sure, that game doesn't have the historical romance of chess, but I don't think a computer would ultimately own all the property. I could be wrong on this (or they could have already done and I just not know), but I would imagine at the end of the day, humans will be the Monopoly masters for some time to some. That's reassuring in its way.
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What amuses me is the possibility that chess may some day be "solved," much like tic tac toe. It would definitely take some of the fun out of playing, though.
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But Monopoly has an element of chance in it. Chess is great -- not for the historical romance -- but because it is pure strategy. If Kasparov beats X3D Fritz, it won't be because a lucky roll landed him on "Free Parking."
11/17/03 10:35 AM