Computer Chess Engine Competition

For those of you who enjoy geeking out on chess, I highly recommend the current computer engine tournament taking place:

http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php

The highest rated computers are now over 3100. Compare that with the top rated human players, who are in the 2800 range (my last rating was a distant 2114).

>Houdini 4 vs Chiron 2

The debate I was interested in ... maybe this is a dead horse now ... was over whether chess engines would continue to compete with humans in tournaments. Kasparov's claim at the time of Big Blue was that humans would still win *tournaments* against the best chess computers, because entering tournaments meant being able to study their games. Then, he hinted, we would all find out that these beasts are in fact hidden chess grandmasters in the disguise of a machine, so to speak. It was a matter of how much they would allow exposure.

But I never tried much to follow up on the debate about this, though I noted IBM's response to the challenge was to destroy, Kirk-like*, their creation.

Perhaps now, with these things playing each other, their games *will* be studied.

Quote: odiousgambit

But I never tried much to follow up on the debate about this, though I noted IBM's response to the challenge was to destroy, Kirk-like*, their creation.

Ironic, considering how Kirk always managed to beat the Enterprise's computer in chess (a fact that Spock used to disprove an accusation that Kirk murdered a crewmember in one episode).

Wasn't there a year where the winner of this tournament was disqualified because it was discovered, or at least very highly assumed, that the winner used code taken from two other chess engines?

Quote: odiousgambit

The debate I was interested in ... maybe this is a dead horse now ... was over whether chess engines would continue to compete with humans in tournaments.

A copy of freeware stockfish running on a shitty, three-year old smartphone wouldn't lose a game to Magnus Carlsen, the best human chess player ever. Carlsen would be lucky to get 5 draws and 5 losses out of 10.

It's not even close to a debate.

Quote: sodawater

A copy of freeware stockfish running on a shitty, three-year old smartphone wouldn't lose a game to Magnus Carlsen, the best human chess player ever. Carlsen would be lucky to get 5 draws and 5 losses out of 10.

It's not even close to a debate.

You have me looking it up.

A Wikipedia article seems to be confirming what you say; I think it is getting difficult to get humans to play them. Are the Grandmasters even talking about it?

This below of not quite 5 years ago may be the last we will hear of such competition?

Quote: article

In September 2008, Rybka played an odds match against Vadim Milov ... The result was a narrow victory to Milov

and

Quote: article

In 2009 a chess engine running on slower hardware, a 528 MHz HTC Touch HD mobile phone, reached the grandmaster level. The mobile phone won a category 6 tournament with a performance rating 2898. The chess engine Hiarcs 13 runs inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD. Pocket Fritz 4 won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on August 4–14, 2009.[30] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 positions per second.[31] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue that searched 200 million positions per second. Pocket Fritz 4 achieves the same performance as Deep Blue.

sort of echoes what you said. This does seem ominous, as the strategy component must be improving vis a vis the position searching.

Article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-computer_chess_matches