Thursday, February 04, 2010

Free of Prejudice

When I was a kid, computers didn't play chess well. That's ancient history.

(Nerd alert - I actually owned a Boris chess computer, in the late 70's).

Now people try to learn from the computer's style of play. Gary Kasparov says:
It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
Those computers are tyrannical,
making our play more mechanical,
unless you're hell-bent on choosing
a whimsical path toward losing.

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