{"id":2998,"date":"2010-01-24T20:47:30","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T01:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=2998"},"modified":"2010-01-24T20:47:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-25T01:47:30","slug":"the-chess-master-and-the-computer-the-new-york-review-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=2998","title":{"rendered":"The Chess Master and the Computer &#8211; The New York Review of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Humanist pointed me to a review in <em>The New York Review of Books<\/em> by Garry Kasparov titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/23592\">The Chess Master and the Computer<\/a>&#8221; (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?<\/p>\n<p>One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a &#8220;freestyle&#8221; competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.<\/p>\n<p>The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and &#8220;coaching&#8221; their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart&#8217;s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled &#8220;The Chess Master and the Computer&#8221; (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what? &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=2998\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Chess Master and the Computer &#8211; The New York Review of Books<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2999,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998\/revisions\/2999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}