Nfinity wrote on 04/24/10 at 04:51:19:


Unless quantum computing arrives, I don't think that the computational power exists to solve chess in the technical sense, which would involve producing a tree of variations from the first position to the last.  I doubt that such a tree could be stored either, without devoting entire continents to racks of memory.  Perhaps it could though.  Still it might not be possible to store all the variations if we could be absolutely certain that the machine's evaluations were cognizant of them, based on test cases, perhaps.  As with current chess literature, we would store only the variations where a human might not be able to implement the win, or the draw, without the information provided.  That still would be a tree of variations so vast that it would exceed all existing chess literature, perhaps all existing literature of any kind, by several orders of magnitude.  And most of the material would be useless to humans.

Anything short of that would not be a solution to chess.  Absolutely critical is this: a computational apparatus producing anything short of an exhaustive tree from the current position to the last would not be certain to produce a correct evaluation.

So what your claim is, I am not sure.  That computers will gradually become stronger in chess?  That's hardly a very original observation, or even one that anyone with half a brain would dispute.  That a computer will some day be world champion?  Same deal.

P.S. That website is pretty funny.  Unwitting self-parody is always rich.  Also, if Chess Truth ever came knocking on my door, the very first system about which I would ask him would not be the Blackmar-Diemer.

Alias wrote on 04/23/10 at 09:37:22:


And they said computers could never beat humans.  So little faith, have you, in the technology on which modern day chess relies so heavily?  You could be forgiven; even Kasparov was a skeptic until he fell victim to the machine.   

Chess is a game with well-defined rules that are easily comprehensible to a computer.  Analysis of the games relies only on the position on the board, not on the player behind the pieces.  Basically, it doesn't get much easier for a computer to dominate humans at it.  It's only a matter of time before somebody harnesses the technology to bust the human "experts".  Using distributed computing that's already available in order to accomplish that goal is a great idea.

The more you facepalm at this, the harder I will laugh when it yields results.

Wow! They cover my exact opening repertoire!

*duck*

--Fromper