Simply on the basis of telling a fascinating story, the series is well worth reading. Beyond that, some of what particularly struck me was that: - since about

Simply on the basis of telling a fascinating story, the series is well worth reading. Beyond that, some of what particularly struck me was that: - since about 2005, chess programs that run on a regular PC have consistently outperformed the best human grandmasters, and the skill of the computer chess programs continues to improve. 2005 was a quantum shift in the chess programming world, when chess programs first played "brilliant games with deep, beautiful combinations...[and] routinely produce[d] highly artistic masterpieces of chess while avoiding a great many pointless “computer” moves that for many years had been a source of ridicule among strong human players." - improvement in algorithms is driven by an active community ecosystem, open source contributions and flagrant copying of the brilliant insights of a few. No matter how brilliant the insight, the community is able to improve upon it. Intellectual property protection would have stopped much of this improvement in its tracks. It's four separate articles, so I posted the first. All four are: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7791 http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7791 (part 1) http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7807 http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7807 (part 2) http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7811 http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7811 (part 3) http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7813 http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7813 (part 4)