computer chess

From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 00:04:16 MDT


I searched and found a couple things on which I need
to correct myself.

> Spike wrote:
>
>Note the difficulty in finding out how the humans are
>doing in the Harvard Cup, in which the top U.S.
>grandmasters plus some slashers from overseas
>gather semiannually to play rapid format against the
>commercial software.

The Harvard Cup site says the tournament has not
been held since the sixth one in December of 1995 with
the playoff in May of 1996.

http://www.h3.org/HarvardCup/HarvardCup6.html

That tournament was about 35% silicon 65% carbon,
actually a better for result for the carbon units than the
previous tournament held a year earlier.

>At that time they were using 200 MHz Pentium II
>class processors.

OK, so it was 133 and 166 Mhz Pentium Pros. In
any case, since then we have had three generations
of processors and more than a factor of 10 improvement
in processor speed. I saw a 1.7 Mhz P4 for sale at
Fry's last week for 1400 bucks. I bet those machines
would scalp some the best carbon based players.

>I haven't been able to find a
>Harvard Cup or equivalent carbon vs silicon
>competition using the >1 GHz class of processors.

However, I now suspect some such tournament
must be taking place somewhere, behind closed
doors with the scores being kept secret for reasons
obvious to those handful of players in this world
who manage to make a living playing chess.

spike



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