On Friday, December 5, 1997 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-8, Daniel Baechli wrote:
> > Nor can we exclude the possibility that Garry Kasparov has a radio
> > transceiver in his head via which he receives chess instructions from
> > a distant galaxy.
> A particular nice rhetoric image which doesn't
> says anything about the underlying supposition.
> > Given the time limits of tournament play, a room full of grandmasters
> > will not generally do better than the best among them. However,
> > a single grandmaster in a room, able to move the pieces around on
> > multiple boards and with a computer to check for tactics, could
> > certainly outplay GK. But then we need to explain why DB made so
> > many inferior "computer-like" moves against GK.
> My intention was in saying that maybe, maybe some of
> the moves have not been calculated by the program itself.
> > A careful examination of the games reveals that there is steady ground
> > for the answer "not yet". DB would have lost the match had GK played
> > his normal openings, normal style, and had not psychologically
> > collapsed.
> How can you know?
> > This is argumentum ad ignorantiam. There is no technical reason why
> > a computer cannot play any particular move. Computers sometimes play
> > very good moves for not very good reasons, as do humans. And the
> > advantage to be gained from looking at 200 million *quiescent* positions
> > per second is hard to fathom. GK's opinions about what chess programs
> > can do are not particularly authoritative.
> Although the parantheses, I wanted to point out, that the machine
> played some moves which haven't been objectively possibly the best,
> but inhibited Kasparov to play the way he's used to.
> > Why is Kasparov more respectable if he lost to some human than to
> > a machine that can evaluate 200 million positions per second?
> > GK is the strongest human chess player in the world by quite a margin.
> > Just who are these grandmasters in a room who not only could beat him,
> > but could do so by making many bizarre moves much more common in
> > computer play than human play? GK broke down psychologically
> > during the match and played some chess quite beneath his capabilities.
> > If you are looking for paranoid fantasies, it would be more plausible to
> > imagine, as Bobby Fischer used to, that he was being bombarded
> > with subsonic noise or drugs.
> After my personal opinion, one cannot mention
> this two sorts of games in the same sentence.
> > That is quite circular. If DB can beat great chessplayers regularly,
> > then it *has* reached their strength. If it still has fatal weak
> > points, then that is not relevant here, since GK was playing against
> > what he thought were its weak points based upon past experience,
> > including previous versions of DB and DT, experience which turned
> > out not to be entirely applicable to the latest version.
> - Kasparov lost, but after all, what was the score?
> - Has DB beaten great chess players regularly?
> - Does Kasparov has been giving the oppurtunity to analyse
> some games DB has played before?
> I don't see a reason for getting too emotional about this subject.
> If one can buy a chess computer for $50 in two years which is
> able to beat all great chess players regularly, why should they
> feel minor or stop playing their tournaments? No average chess
> player feels minor for the fact, that she or he probably can't hold
> one game out of ten against a good computer program.
> - - - - - - -
> DBaechli

So much idiocy.