cracraft@hyper-sun1.jpl.nasa.gov (Stuart Cracraft) (06/11/88)
Now that there has been a "settling in" period, when people have been able to digest the recent news, it seems advisable to put it in perspective. A brief retrospective: Two new chess machines played in an Eastern U.S. chess tournament against 18 masters and a few experts and class players. While the performance of the machines, especially one of them which came in 2nd in the tournament with a performance rating of over USCF 2500, is laudable, an inspection of the games reveals that many of the machine's human opponents sacrificed pawns and exchanges needlessly. This style of play against an unknown opponent (the machine) by players would seem to indicate a level of contempt that is generally self-defeating. Discomforting is the fact that several of these players had faced very powerful computer programs earlier in their careers, almost always scoring a plus. The players who indicate contemptuousness end up taking unordinary risks and generally underestimating most of their opponent's moves; this lowers their quality of play and greatly degrades their performance. So, while I think the performance of the 2nd-runner and its predecessor is quite good, I also feel that players will be "on-guard" even more so in the future and that this incident does not mean a lessening of human chess; rather, it is a call to arms so that we may all regard our opponent with more respect. Stuart