Defending Humanity's Honor

Like Kramnik, I decided to pit myself against a chess program and hope for the best. Here's the result:

Interesting game and seems to be very well played by you. I would have made the machine resign on say the 46th move. 

does not the machine have a "resign"?

Some engines do resign, some don't. It depends on the programmer's taste, really. 

I don't think computer ever resign.  They always play until the bitter end, in my experience.  

you could have a mate with 36.Qf8#

Some do, actually. The GUI, Arena, also forces them to sometimes. And thanks, idoogy!

36...Kh7.

Now that I look at it, Qf8+ doesn't seem to do much. Perhaps that might be why I didn't notice it -- for once, I hit the right idea!

Fried Liver would be the last opening I would have tried against a computer since I've been told that tend to do much better than humans in sharp, tactical positions due to their superior ability to calculate. But you won in the end, and that's what counts.  GJ

Thanks :)

I chose it because I know it well -- GMs do better than normal humans in sharp, tactical positions too, but would you completely change your opening strategy just because you are playing against one? That's actually an interesting thought.

Most computers I'm familiar with always play for position and are pretty weak on tactics.  I couldn't understand 30...Qg5 and not Qe6

If you wish to defend humanity's honor against a chess computer.  Challenge it to a game of hopscotch after it beats you.  Or maybe bowling, tennis, ping pong, etc...  A chess program is a specialized piece of software that  didn't even learn the game on it's own.  Is our honor really at stake?

If anyone is challenging our honor it's the software engineers that can program a machine to beat most human chess players.  I've always been curious regarding the average FIDE rating of any chess programmers that play the game themselves. 

...Qe6 and then 31. Qxe6 is possibly what it was seeing.

You're right.  As they say, "Play the board, not the player."

I was merely quoting Kramnik :)

The computer programmers usually aren't all that great. For example, the founder of Deep Blue, Feng-hsiung Hsu, was a 1600 player (if my memory is correct).

Joel Benjamin, a GM, also had a hand in Deep Blue.

I think the 1600 player you talk about was probably just a programmer, whereas strong players are needed to tell them what to program, e.g. what it should consider better.

He was the programmer who started the project in the first place. Joel Benjamin's main job was to help discover weaknesses in the computer's playing, I think.

Yeah, which is really teaching it the chess.

But programmers have to write the program in the first place, and then of course there's always debugging...