Fischer vs. Houdini, WHO WOULD WIN??

I don't know how CC and aged laptops get along but I presume this article proves your point of "no motivation" .

The reasons GM don't play top engines has nothing to do with "motivation" (money) .

It is because getting crushed  is annoying especially if your are top GM.  I realise that engines are not error free but it's enough to kick your ass in 4 games out of 6 as it proves my point.

It seems that you have reading difficulties. The Kramnik match was on regular time controls, not CC.

i really don't know why you have brought CC into discussion as it really proves nothing. The fact that a real life IM and CC GM titled player is champion there again proves nothing.

CC is not very popular and it does not get too much attention - perhaps this is why you don't see a patzer winning WC title there. Only the fact that i saw Valutanu Marius in the top 15 CC players (Top list accorind to ICCF) with a CC rating of 2647 and he is a 1560 elo rated player in OTB... proves my point.

Again , all you know about the current champ in CC is because THEY tell you. You have no ideea if he paid to use a custom engine version made specifically for him , you  don't know how he configured the engine , what engine and so on...

I could bet anytime that a dedicated system with a 12-core processor  and a *properly configured* houdini(with pondering enabled and a 2 day / move time) would be the champ. Be that a GM and/or a patzer using it.

And again you miss out the fact that todays engines improve with everygame they loose.

Just for the heck of it : Can you post here a game with Nikolai beating a top engine in CC (Houdini or Rybka 4)? Or anyone that has a game in wich they won against an top engine in CC. Please post it here. WON! Not draw!

I'm not sure but Hydra may have been a better chess player than the modern engines running on a decent Desktop computer. Arno Nickel won a match 2-0 against Hydra.

There's a huge difference between CC and OTB, so of course bringing up CC is relevant to the discussion.

The discussion originally concerned the statement that Fischer would beat Houdini easily in normal chess and that other top players would do the same given enough thinking time to avoid tactical errors (without specifying how much time they need to avoid tactical errors). As for CC, Fischer had no experience of it and I have no idea how well he would have done, but statements about how easy it would be for him to beat Houdini should be taken with a grain of salt. Five years ago Ehlvest played a pawn odds match against Rybka and lost badly, this is how one of the games looked:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1471891

Ehlvest reached 2643 around then and had briefly been top 5 the previous decade so he is no weak player. Of course Houdini of today is a few hundred Elo points stronger than Rybka was five years ago, and not an opponent to be underestimated.

As for Hydra, the two CC games Arno Nickel won were against an older version than the one that scored 5.5-0.5 against Adams (then world #7) seven years ago. It's hard to compare Houdini of today with Hydra of seven years ago, the development is fast in computer chess. In CC the human of course uses various chess engines, so there's no reason that any strong CC player equipped with Houdini would be at a disadvantage against the same engine, but that is another question.

Surely it is only a matter of time before that specific positional knowledge/evaluation is programmed in?

Surely enough, but the timetable is not certain. Currently, they fail to grasp positional nuances a strong GM catches in a snap, even if they are armed with very analytical opening books. Tactically of course, they can foresee everything, but when they have to pick between 4-5 moves of approximately equal value (materialistically speaking), they quite often play far from optimally.

Well I find this statement rather interesting.  Why is it that you think that an engine would probably be better in 960 but not in the normal starting position?

Tactics shouldn't be the problem since we allocate the human players enough time. 

Yifan Hou vs Houdini

Hou wini?

lol, 

Simply because chess960 does have a lot of complex positional setups, but some 99% of the GM's (the late Fischer included) are not terribly familiar with.

So, in chess960, the main weakness of the chess engines currently (proper evaluation of the strategical elements of a lot of stock positions), would be of lesser importance. OK, a super-GM when motivated would invent anti-computer positions even in chess960, but this requires quite a bit of work, and I guess noone will bother doing that without motivation (which of course is money).

kasparov vs houdini. who would win?

ok. thx for your response. Too be honest, I don't know much about 3000+ strength chessprograms like Houdini.

However it does seem logical to me that programming it to avoid closed positions (perhaps even at the costst of a pawn?)  would not be to hard, if it would be necessary that is. On the other hand I agree that "weaker" programs tend to have problems with closed positions.

The main reason that I responded was that I always thought that having the option to use a database would be a huge advantage for a program over the human. And they lack that option in 960.

Yes, you can arm engines with a huge book opening. But in certain positions, this is not of much help: They still evaluate improperly, and play weak moves.

I have been using engines quite a bit to purify the opening repertoires I'm teaching, but on certain openings (Closed Ruy Lopez, King's Indians) their suggestions vary from secondclass to outright ridiculous, positionally speaking. There, you just ignore their suggestion, and insert the move you KNOW (based on human positional understanding and chessic principles) that it does have to be the right one.

Honestly, I don't like those topics when we compare 2 players of different eras/a human player to a machine. But to answer the main question, I think Houdini will win. Fischer is certainly a great chess player, but he can be unfamiliar with many modern lines and new ideas about the game, which Houdini "knows" perfectly well.

The OP was just a joke I think, not meant to be taken seriously.

The reason I say Hydra may have been stronger than a modern engine on a PC is because of Hydra's advantage in hardware.

I don't know if Nickel was allowed use of an engine or not. This page makes me think not. They say Nickel was "Unplugged".

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1339073

Here are the other two games:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1411074

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1339074

Edit: It seems both sides got assistance:

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Arno_Nickel

just analised the last game with Chessmaster GM ed. with a 1 minute / move thinking time  and "even" a 2970 ELO engine with a those basic settings  recognized 42. Rg8 (in the second game) as a terrible blunder.  I just can't imagine adding Houdini that is   >300 ELO stronger than CM. Again , if someone has a match won in CC against x64 bit version of Houdini running on at least dual core i would like to see it. I see numerous people trying to convince me chess engines play poor positional chess but so far i never saw a chess game (be that CC or not) in which the human won.

pfren , your move.

again , i would like to see that CC game where a human *defeated* a properly configured Houdini or Rybka computer.

come on whe will never know if fisher was the best and the greatest , he never played to kasparov , kasparov level is much much much higher than boris spassky, kasparov played to boris spassky  and won easily

houdini could make fischer disappear

maybe that is what happened to fischer in 1973

by the way,

i read that he stayed at some canadian gm's house in san francisco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Biyiasas