Article

[Stuart Cracraft]

Quite a few errors in this piece but it forecasts a symbiont fusion for the 
game.

More Chess Players Use Computers for Edge

By AMY HARMON

16e5eef.jpgarry Kasparov, the world's leading chess player, is tied with a 
powerful computer program in a six-game match at the New York Athletic Club 
that will conclude tomorrow. But whoever wins this latest 
man-versus-machine showdown, chess players say computers have already 
scored a profound victory by changing the way humans play against one another.

It comes as little surprise that computers are now able to triumph 
regularly over the top human chess players. What few foresaw was how 
quickly people would become reliant on the machines for their own battles.

Players of every level are turning increasingly to computers to plan their 
moves and suggest their strategies, and some fear that human mastery of a 
game valued for centuries as a benchmark of intelligence is being 
irrevocably diluted.

"We don't work at chess anymore," Evgeny Bareev, the world's eighth-ranked 
player, told ChessBase Magazine. "We just look at the stupid computer, we 
follow the latest games and find small improvements. We have lost depth."

When Mr. Kasparov famously lost his species' hold on the chess crown to a 
refrigerator-size I.B.M. computer called Deep Blue in 1997, chess was still 
played very much as it had been for centuries. Since then, as advances in 
computing speed have enabled software on a standard PC to rival the 
supercomputers of an earlier era, a generation of human players has been 
seduced into dependence on silicon assistance.

A version of Deep Junior, the chess program that is playing Mr. Kasparov 
this week, can be bought for $50, as can rival programs with names like 
Fritz and Shredder. Players use the software to analyze the strength of any 
particular move and to simulate an opponent's many possible responses 
several moves out.

Chess players who once relied on thick tomes of annotated games and 
Post-its to mark their favorite strategies now use computer programs to 
search constantly updated online databases of two million or more of 
history's most significant games. It is standard practice for players to 
call up all the past games of opponents they will be facing in tournaments 
and direct the software to analyze the best possible attacks.

Moreover, as the Internet replaces chess clubs as the main forum for games, 
chess experts estimate that humans are surreptitiously being assisted by 
computers in at least half of the hundreds of thousands of games that are 
played online each day.

"A lot of people are just parroting what Fritz tells them to do," said 
Frederic Friedel, whose company, ChessBase, recently developed software for 
its Internet servers to try to prevent computer-assisted cheating among 
players who go there to find games. "On the other hand, knowledge always 
leads to creativity."

Players are becoming proficient in chess at much earlier ages as a result 
of easy access to information on the Internet, chess experts say. But 
critics of computer-assisted playing say they are also burning out sooner 
because the game has become so much more demanding.

The most serious players say they feel compelled to study the 1,000 or so 
master-level games played around the world each week that are immediately 
annotated and made available on the Internet. Yet absorbing so much 
information, some players say, detracts from an ability to concentrate 
intensely on developing a personal style or strategy.

"People don't experiment as much anymore," particularly in the opening 
phase of the game, said Maurice Ashley, a grandmaster from Brooklyn who is 
providing commentary for the Kasparov-Deep Junior match. "That's a loss."

Even Mr. Kasparov now pays a team of chess grandmasters to scour the 
Internet daily for the newest move played anywhere in the world. His brain 
trust spends long hours churning through computer simulations of thousands 
of moves, which Mr. Kasparov, considered by many to be the strongest player 
in the history of chess, memorizes before tournaments.

Some chess aficionados see the increase in the melding of human 
intelligence and computer technology as a natural development for a game 
long valued as an even playing field for the mind. Many players say the 
availability of online information democratizes the game. They also contend 
that computers have emboldened people to try more daring strategies that 
earn the endorsement of their software.

Principles once sacred, like the benefits of working in the center of the 
board, can be challenged in computer simulations far more easily than on 
the board or in the mind

"Because of computers, humans are playing more broadly, and there are 
astonishing numbers of new ideas," said John Watson, the author of several 
books on modern chess strategy. "Computers are opening the game up much 
more than they are closing it."

But others say chess is becoming more like checkers, with so much known or 
memorized that games now more often end in draws. They complain that 
players have become slaves to their software, so fascinated with the myriad 
possibilities it presents that they do not bother to work out their own new 
strategies.

"In the past, you weren't trying to clog your memory with all this other 
stuff," said Joel Benjamin, a grandmaster in New York who worked with 
I.B.M. on Deep Blue. "Now you know more, but you also forget more." Mr. 
Benjamin compared chess players' reliance on computers to the subtle 
addiction that comes with programming numbers into a phone or a Palm 
organizer. It is not uncommon, he said, to see a player's position suddenly 
fall apart during a game because the player has memorized a series of 
moves, but not internalized the logic behind them.

Technology historians say the effects of computer technology on chess echo 
a classic theme articulated by George Orwell in "The Road to Wigan Pier," 
an investigation of labor conditions in England at the turn of the century. 
"He said machines are moving in and polluting the spiritual landscape, not 
on purpose, but because they can't help it," said David Gelernter, a 
computer scientist at Yale. "This is the machine age, and no one uses a 
pump when you can turn on the tap. But don't think that won't cost us."

More to the point, some chess experts say, computers have taken some of the 
fun out of the game, designated the "touchstone of the intellect" by Goethe 
and seen by Benjamin Franklin as a metaphor for life.

While chess is still one of the few games where physical prowess and chance 
play no role (except in choosing who goes first), players can no longer 
rely solely on their singular intellects to succeed. They must also be much 
more adept at memorization and manipulating information.

"What's happening with chess is it's gradually losing its place as the par 
excellence intellectual activity," said Hans Berliner, a former world 
correspondence chess champion and professor emeritus of computer science at 
Carnegie Mellon. "You don't have to be really good anymore to get good 
results. Chess is winding down."

Mr. Berliner, whose work on computer chess helped lead to Deep Blue and its 
descendants, said smart people in search of a challenging board game might 
try a game called go, which is popular in Asia and played with black stones 
and white stones. The possible combinations are far greater than those in 
chess, which come to about 10 to the 40th power.

Because the nature of the game makes it much harder for a computer to 
calculate its way to success, no computer has come close to beating a human 
at go, and no human go player would dream of depending on a computer for 
advice — at least for the moment.

Not everyone is prepared to give up on chess, which has after all been 
around for about 1,500 years. The game is still going strong among the 
chess hustlers in Washington Square Park, depicted in the movie "Searching 
for Bobby Fischer." The Internet has spawned untold numbers of games that 
would never otherwise have been played, allowing anybody, anywhere, of any 
rank to find an opponent, at any time.

Some players support a variation of the game proposed by Mr. Fischer, the 
former world champion, to prevent memorization from dominating the game: 
the pieces behind the pawns are randomly arranged at the beginning of each 
game.

Mr. Kasparov champions the idea of "advanced chess," in which humans 
compete by using sanctioned computer software during the game, and he has 
participated in one such game. The future of chess, Mr. Kasparov and others 
suggest, lies not in the competition between man and machine, but in their 
fusion.

On the Internet site of ChessBase, a leading publisher of chess programs, a 
Centaur Room is set aside for people who want to play as a team with their 
computers.

At an advanced chess tournament in 1999 that Mr. Friedel, the founder of 
ChessBase, helped stage, two of the world's highest-ranking players, 
Viswanathan Anand and Anatoly Karpov, played each other with fast desktop 
computers running the latest version of a chess analyzer program provided 
by the sponsor. Each player's computer screen was projected so that the 
audience could see him experiment with moves, though the opponent could not.

At one point, Anand an a series of simulations in which he sacrificed a 
piece to push a pawn across the board in order to get a queen and win. 
After using 10 precious minutes, the software program, Fritz, signaled that 
Anand had hit upon a winning play. He proceeded to execute the sequence and 
win the game.

"The audience," Mr. Friedel said, "was in rapture."