Thursday, December 21, 2006

chess: man vs. machine

[12/12/06] Although it received little mention in the popular press, Vladimir Kramnik, the world's reigning chess champion, was defeated last week 4-2 by the computer Deep Fritz, in a best-of-six-game match.

The defeat was not really that surprising. When Kramnik last met Deep Fritz four years ago, he battled the computer to a 4-4 tie. Since then, however, the computer has only gotten better. In fact, since 2002, Kramnik's "Elo" rating -- which measures the strength of a chess player -- has dropped, while Deep Fritz (an improvement from IBM's (NYSE: IBM) famous Deep Blue program) increased the number of positions it could calculate per second from 2.7 million to 8 million.

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