Man vs. Machine - Who is Winning?
"Every year computers are becoming stronger at chess, holding their own against the very strongest players. So very soon they will overtake their human counterparts. Right? Not necessarily, says statistician Jeff Sonas, who doesn't believe that computers will inevitably surpass the top humans. In a series of articles Jeff presents empirical evidence to support his claim."
Jeff Sonas points out that humanity's chess abilities are improving as well and cannot be held static in comparison to the improvements made on computer hardware and chess software. Read his article on the Chessbase Website.
UPDATE:
Part II of Jeff Sonas' article is up. In this part he discusses evidence that the rate of improvement for computers and the rate of improvement for top Grandmasters is currently neck and neck.
Comments
Great article--another reason to love chess!
Being from Utah, you may be interested to know the Utah Jazz are trying out a guard this year who is a big chess fan. Lavor Postell is a young shooting guard who last played with the Knicks. The Deseret News just did a story on him:
"NBA.com has a two-page story with three pictures about Postell "reviewing" NBA 2K2, a video game by Sega. "I don't play video games," corrected a puzzled Postell. "I did, like, an appearance like that, but I never play video games. I don't know how to play them. No Play Stations, no X-Boxes." In fact, Postell says, "I'd rather play chess. I'm a chess man. I've got like seven chessboards at my place. I go online and play, or I play my friends.""
Posted by: dende blogger | October 10, 2003 12:19 PM | Reply to this comment