Chess engines VS chess masters
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Wait a minute! If they violated the touch move rule, then we should have won the games by default. How come we didn't realize this. We have been deceived by those silicon buggers! Darn!
There was a long debate (in another thread) as to whether the Chess WC (plus chess engine) was "objectively" stronger than the best stand-alone chess engine.
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/humans-v-houdini-chess-engine-elo-3300
kborg wrote:
At the turn of the 20th century, human raced against gas-engine carriages, until they lost that race. Ditto with Chess Engines today. That race was surely over, 5 or 10 years ago. Sadly the humans lost, yet again.
But what about the idea that the computers are violating the "touch move" rule?
Aren't the engines (in some cyber-silly philosophical world) really moving all the pieces all over the board, before they choose their next move?
Feel free to refute my conjectural foolishness.
Well, since it's illegal to bring notes to a game, isn't the computers pre-progammed opening knowledge already a violation?
A computer's "opening knowledge" is conceptually no different than a person's opening knowledge. The only difference is that their memory is better, and they never forget or confuse lines or move orders. (There are differences, of course, like that computers don't memorize ideas behind the openings like people do, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether having prior knowledge of a position is cheating. Both humans and computers have tons of prior knowledge.)
The notion that computers touch the pieces when they analyze lines is a bit silly. If that argument had merit, then human beings would also be touching the pieces when they visualize lines in their head.
Endgame tablebases, however, have no human analog.
It's not exactly the same, but I think there is an analog. For example, you can give me any legal position where I have two queens and a king against a king, and I can pretty quickly tell you the shortest sequence of moves that forces mate and how many moves it will take.
It's true that I haven't memorized the positions like the computer has, but I think the key concept underlying tablebases is not that they use exhaustive memorization of every possible position, but that they are perfect and absolutely infallible. People too are perfect and infallible with two queens and king against king, and even a few other simple endings.
The difference between people and computers in this regard is just a quantitative difference. Their perfect endgame knowledge is much vaster than mine, but it's not a fundamentally different kind of knowledge.
Feb 15, 2012
0
#27
kborg wrote:
There was a long debate (in another thread) as to whether the Chess WC (plus chess engine) was "objectively" stronger than the best stand-alone chess engine.
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/humans-v-houdini-chess-engine-elo-3300
I thought that debate was whether an unassisted human was objectively stronger than the best stand-alone engine at extremely long time controls.
Isn't it clear that an engine assisted human could beat the best stand alone engine?
Does anybody know the most recent human-computer match? Blitz doesn't count because computers are enormously better at it than humans. The last one I know of was in 2005 when Arno Nickel beat the supercomputer Hydra.
browni3141 wrote:
Does anybody know the most recent human-computer match? Blitz doesn't count because computers are enormously better at it than humans. The last one I know of was in 2005 when Arno Nickel beat the supercomputer Hydra.
I don't have the slightest idea about this match, I'll try to find it! Thanks 
Hm. People play mostly by using pattern recognition, but computer programs are also slowly getting better at it.
For instance, have a look at this:
http://gizmodo.com/5885904/this-computer-program-is-smarter-than-96-percent-of-humans
Kingpatzer wrote:
Endgame tablebases, however, have no human analog.
Yes they do. His name is Kramnik.
Though I've long suspected he has the Namilov tables on a chip in his head.... 
Which brings up a question - how would cyborgs be playing chess? :P
Well, anyone cheating using an electronic device (mobile phone sending move, or a chess computer) is already an "augmented human" so it depends on how we are defining a cyborg....