My opinion on chess becoming a marketable entertainment option, is that it will never happen. A good portion of society, at least in the United States, is really just in survival mode with the recession. The stimulus that people are seeking for entertainment, for relaxation, is certainly not going to be a strenuous mental activity. The masses here have a hard enough time adjusting from the main sports to other sports, or even just the same sports played by women. The role I see for chess is a leisure activity, something that we could impliment in schools to boost education. In the US, a general turnaround of values will have to come first to even take steps to make chess more important. The educational system itself is an undervalued entity, oft put on the backburner. So chess, being a piece of that system, suffers equally so. Once education is valued, public opinion of chess will also rise. Sadly I think this progression will be too slow to bear.
Game Over: Kasparov v. The Machine
Well he drew a series against deep junior in 2003..
I rented the DVD, a somewhat amusing documentary, but very dry at the same time. It does give a good view into the historic match, but there are better games to analyze. Not highly recommended, but it's all right.
R&O are being paid by chess.com.
It´s a pity computers are not posting their opinion. Aren´t we are lucky in using computers to post ours ?
If the pay were good, I'd post for chess.com and I promise at least one cultural allusion per post. No allusions until then though....
Even other games are starting to feel the heat. Checkers was mastered by Chinook. Go will be tamed as the years go by more sophisticated computer programs and supercomputers will eventually master it.
People are going to be more and more threatened by robotics and computers because they challenge their beliefs in what is intelligence and what is "number crunching." In the computer science world, scientists believe that a human minds computation sits at around 40 petaflops. This doesn't mean we will have computers with self-awareness, but some would say we're well on our way.
Great post.
Pleiades is supposed to hit 1 petaflop this year, I believe?
Yeah and it will hit 10 Petaflops in 2012. We've hit 1 petaflop with IBM Roadrunner last year. We'll hit 1000 Petaflops (1 exaflop) in 2019 (according to the logarithmic plot on Top 500 supercomputers).
Always remember that a computers ability to think, and a computers ability to do math, are two entirely different things. Did computers win the chess war, of course. Will a computer ever be able to truly create? Never. You can't make a synthetic soul. And for all the people that are concerned about computers 'killing' chess, you're off the mark too. I don't know about anyone elses skill level, but I am not a prodigy myself, nor do I play against geniuses, so our chess games are still played at the human level. Maybe I am a bit slow or something, but if you plopped the Cliff's Notes to the Big Book Of Solved Chess onto my lap, I wouldn't be able to retain even a sliver of it, let alone implement it. Just consider how few people have been able to assimilate the chess knowledge of the past few millennia. This new flow of database perfection really doesn't seem to matter much.