[lbo-talk] Kramnik vs Deep Fritz

ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Mon Nov 27 21:08:00 PST 2006


At around 27/11/06 6:10 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 5:56 PM, ravi wrote:
>
>> <snip happens>
>> alarm bells in my head, but I guess Kramnik felt he had tonnes of room
>> to manoeuvre towards the Qe3 that he was looking at into the future. But
>> what do I know ;-).
>
> More than I do. I know as little of what you're talking about as when
>

If you strip away the jargon it's simple, really. There is a 6 game series going on between current men's chess #1 Kramnik and an Intel based computer (not a mainframe) called Deep Fritz. When they met last time, I think it was 4-4 draw. This time around is considered the first time the human starts out as the underdog and may well be the last time this thing is even competitive!

Game 1 was on Saturday and was a draw. In today's game, which seemed a fairly aggressive one to me (others might differ), somewhere at the half-point of the game, Kramnik seemed to have gained a small advantage. As he pushed through with his pieces he failed to notice something very basic: that a particular move by the computer had put him at risk of being one move away from a checkmate. This is an amazing error on the part of such a skilled player!

Unlike Kasparov, I don't find anything bawl-worthy about losing to a computer (perhaps because I have suffered that humiliation many times over, or perhaps because I think humans are dumber than computers ;-)), but nevertheless, it was dismaying to watch someone throw away a crucial game like that.

--ravi



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