Right now there’s a man vs. machine chess match between world champion (the real world champion) Vladimir Kramnik and Fritz 10. It well-established at this point that computers can play better chess than humans, and I do not think that any competition pitting people against computers has been won by the people in the past few years. Garry Kasparov’s defeat by Deep Blue in 1997 was well-publicized, but Kasparov historically has tended to underperform against computers because his dynamic, sacrificial style is poor strategy against the silicon monsters. Since computers can calculate tactics dreadfully well, a more strategic style is usually called for.
Currently, the strongest chess computer is probably considered to be Hydra, which runs on specialized hardware (Fritz is probably very close), and last year beat the English GM Michael Adams 5.5-0.5 in a six game match. Adams, a defensive, positional player, was probably a better-suited adversary than a player like Kasparov to a strong computer. So there’s pretty much no hope that humans will ever be able to regain their supremacy in chess, even though Kramnik is one of the deepest positional players today, and probably has a better understanding of chess than anyone else (including the people who actually program computers). So if anyone can defend humanity’s honour, Kramnik is the man.
Then he went and did this.
