Can a Computer Play Chess?

How do you think GM's play blitz so awesomely good? Does their brain process information a milion times faster than a normal human's?

It isn't humanly possible to memorize enough games to compare to the way computers play.  Bottom line is still simply that we play in a very different way. 

BTW in the starting position, queens still go on their color

i'm aware. it's a hypothetical.

LOL! Bad kitteh!

Now THIS is a quality thread! Much respect to OP!

(nothing to add, just saying ;))

I think the difference between human players and computers is that we unconsciously remember many  game patterns and thus know what move to make. This is what distinguishes a good master from a grandmaster, # of typical positions and plans they know. Computers calculate moves, as someone said, just base on a current position.

I think perhaps a better question is can HUMANS play chess? Given that chess is all about tactics, and given the fact that human beings generally suck at tactics, I think the answer is NO! In order to compensate for our shortcomings, we humans had to invent things like "strategy" and "general principles" which actually work surprisingly well, but compared to the perfect tactical calculation that computers possess, human beings end up getting crushed. It's only human vanity that makes us assume that humans play chess the "right way" and computers play chess the "wrong way". In fact, all the evidence is to the contrary: computers win every time against humans!

I'd say that both humans and computers play chess, but people have more talent for it. Theoritically, people should be able to play chess better than computers since our way of looking at the game is much more efficient than the processes a computer uses. Practically, however, we are only human and thus have other interests and don't focus on chess to the exclusion of all elseIf you could, hypothetically, take a very young brain out of somebody's head and put it in a jar(Yes, let's pretend this is Futurama); and then gave it stimuli designed to optimize it's chess playing ability(i.e., make it develop it's chess skills at the expense of other abilities.), eventually you'd get a chess player much more powerful than any modern computer. But that's just a hypothetical scenario.

You see, in the kitty picture, a5 is clearly black (board oriented correctly) and the queen is to the left of the king (pieces set up correctly).

The white queen is about to lose the ball or shave a spike from its crown though.

In this picture, we can see 8 pawns, and so we can see c3 is a dark square (board oriented correctly)  However, the white queen is on the right of the white king (We can clearly see a rook, knight, and bishop) and so the pieces are set up incorrectly.  Just messin' with Trigs.

Well, that post took 6 edits to format correctly lol

A computer could have done that much quicker.

Humans are much better than computers at teaching kittens to play chess. Also, computers can't juggle kittens.

 For now...