Computer as western chess champion

In today's Washington Post, chess columnist Lubomir Kavalek summarized 2005 activities. One segment deals with "Incredible Machines." It seems that, in June 2005, Hydra, a computer program, beat UK's grandmaster Michael Adams Kavalek with a score of 5.5: 0.5 -- the computer had 5 wins and a draw out of six games! In November, Hydra and two other computer programs (Fritz and Junior) defeated three FIDE world champions (Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustain Kasimdzhanov) by a more respectable, but still one-sided score of 8-4! These news, astonishing as they undoubtedly are, are to be expected. Indeed, back in 1994, in the preface to my book Kriegspiel: Chess Under Uncertainty (Premier Publishing, 144 pages), I stated that: "In a few years, and certainly by the end of this millennium, a computer, endowed with a gigabyte memory to store all past games and nanosecond speed to retrieve winning moves from these past games, will be the World Chess Champion." I then said: "For humans to play chess in the 21st century at a level far above a mere showing of mechanical prowess, we need to add an attribute the computer is not expected to possess, even in millennia to come: intelligence. This is where Kriegspiel comes in." (Kriegspiel is a game based on western-chess rules but played with logic instead of regurgitation. Amassing asymmetrical information using techniques commonly known as game theory now made famous by two Nobel Laureates, including its 2005 recipient Thomas Schelling, it is a favored pastime of information workers such as cryptoanalysts at Bletchley Park, London, during WWII, and Nobel Laureate in Biochemistry Sir John Robinson of UK). Luckily, computers are still unable to play a dominant role in Xiangqi (Chinese chess, which preceded western chess). Computers programmed to play Xiangqi are still second-rate. Perhaps a grant from Levano, which took over IBM's PC business early on, might stimulate more interest in making Xiangqi programs more respectable.
Posted 11:21 am Monday, January 2, 2006