3 ms·

Computers have completely dominated Chess, lookout grocery store employees, you are next.

• gwern 16y ago
  You seem to be making a joke, but my local grocery store has already replaced a few cashiers with machines.
  • lwat 16y ago
    I use them every week at my local Woolworths: http://i.imgur.com/kGwNq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kGwNq.jpg
• jacquesm 16y ago
  I don't think that's the way to look at computer chess. When you play against a computer you have to equate that with playing against a really smart collective (the programmers of the computer) that have access to as much stored information about chess as they could get their hands on with perfect recall that has the limited ability to see in to the future on all your possible moves, countermoves and so on until you hit the limits of computational complexity allowed by the time constraints of the game. That's a fairly uneven match, and saying you 'lost' in that situation is as meaningful as saying a human 'lost' a run over 100 meters against a car. What it does give you is a measurement of the complexity of the tasks that a bunch of dedicated programmers (all of which are probably collectively not as good at chess as your average grand master but still better than most normal players) and a sufficiently fast computer can accomplish, and I think that it is a tribute to our brains that it takes such computational violence with elements of libraries of openings and brute forcing until a 'stable' state has been reached to match our humble 3 pounds of wetware running at a power consumption that would make most netbooks look pretty silly.