17 <P>Although manifestly quite different, Chess and Go are unquestionably the two finest strategic board games in all of human history. Some prefer one, some the
18 other, and there are a small fortunate number who enjoy and excel at both. So why compare these two exemplars in a manner designed to demonstrate that one
19 is superior to the other? The answer to that important question is at least partially provided by the lead editorial in The New York Times of May 10, 1997
23 <P>"No one much cared when computers mastered backgammon and checkers or clobbered lesser Grandmasters in chess. But now that we have sent the greatest
24 chess champion in human history into battle, the prospect of defeat seems unnerving. Still, before mere mortals sink too deeply into despair, it is important to
27 <P>Deep Blue is not thinking the way humans do. It is using its immense number-crunching power to explore millions of moves per second, and applying a set of
28 rules provided by its human masters to pick the strongest. <STRONG>This gives it tremendous powers to play chess, a narrow, circumscribed pursuit that is red
31 <P>Deep Blue won its match with human World Chess Champion Kasparov by causing his resignation in Game 6 after only 19 moves, after what had been an
32 even contest to that point. The following is a typical reaction to this event as posted on the web newsgroup rec.games.chess.misc: "Deep Blue won that final
33 game not because of any superiority it had over Kasparov, but because of bizarre opening play by Kasparov.". To my mind that's a sure indication that
34 Kasparov "cracked" psychologically, but whether or not that alone is sufficient to justify characterizing his defeat as "decisive" I leave to the reader's judgment.</P>
36 <P>The key thing that's almost certain is that with the inevitable improvements that might have been readily added to its hardware and software in subsequent
37 months had IBM chosen to continue its development, Deep Blue would likely have become indisputably superior. But having satisfied whatever corporate
40 <P>Now it appears that those improvements have come to pass, as explained in the Chess column of The New York Times on Sunday Feb 17, 2008, when Grandmaster Joel Benjamin wrote:
41 “If a computer played perfectly, could any human hope to achieve a draw? Chess engines are still far from perfection, but their advances have been staggering.
42 Deep Blue made history in 1997 by defeating Gary Kasparov in a six-game match. A decade later, no human would dare take on a chess program at even strength. The premier chess engine, Rybka, is estimated at (Elo) 3100, or 300 points higher than any player.
43 Rybka is exploring this dominant relationship with handicap matches against grandmasters. After narrowly losing a match at pawn handicap (the rough equivalent of 2 stones in Go? MB) I agreed to participate in an experiment. Every draw would count as a win for me. After we split 4 games, Rybka streaked to a 6-2 rout.
44 Rybka played Black in all 8 games. Larry Kaufman, co-programmer of Rybka, opined that no human has a chance without first move. Playing White greatly increases the chances for a grandmaster to draw with Rybka....”
46 <P>In sharp contrast, the best computer Go programs are still mired at just beyond an advanced beginner's level, despite the presence for over 15 years of a $1
47 million prize for a program which can defeat a master Go professional, offered by the Ing Chang-Ki Goe (his unique spelling!) Educational Foundation of
48 Taiwan. But no claimants for this impressive prize are even visible on the far horizon after all these years! The many reasons for this disparity are set out in the
49 comparison below, but the most obvious concerns the many orders of magnitude vastly greater size of the "move trees" in Go, which render the massive
50 number-crunching power of Deep Blue and even its potentially vastly more powerful descendants totally impotent in the critical opening and middle phases of
53 <P>At least equally important is the fact that, unlike Go, Chess essentially lacks a deep strategic component! To those who may question this assertion,
56 <P>"Chess is 99% tactics." -- Richard Teichmann, (1868-1925), a German Grandmaster who for many years lived in England, and one of the strongest attacking
59 <P>Al Lawrence, former Executive Director of the US Chess Federation said of this quote: "Everyone has always agreed on this point--even before Teichmann,
64 <P>"Thirty years ago Teichmann said that chess is 99% tactics. And despite the enormous strides of chess theory since then, his percentage can only be reduced
65 (by) a few points. Many amateurs think that master games are usually decided by some deeply-laid plan covering all possibilities for at least ten moves.. That is
66 what they conceive the grand strategy of tournaments to be. Actually, however, strategical considerations, while quite important, do not cover a range or depth
67 at all comparable to the popular notion. Very often, in fact, sound strategy can dispense with seeing ahead at all, except in a negative or trivial sense. And it is
68 still true that most games, even between the greatest of the great, are decided by tactics or combinations which have little or nothing to do with the fundamental
73 <P>"It's a hoary old cliché that's been kicked around for three-quarters of a century. But do you know why it's quoted so often? Because Teichmann was right! If
76 <P>Some of my master level chess-playing friends have complained that by making this comparison and demonstrating the objective superiority of Go I am
77 denigrating Chess, but this is a misperception. For example, if we compare precious metals and conclude that gold is more valuable than silver, are we
78 denigrating silver? Or just acknowledging objective reality? It's clear that silver has many vital uses as coinage, an electrical conductor, and in jewelry, so it is
79 of importance in industry, commerce and quality of life areas. Under these circumstances our objective appraisal of its position as less valuable than gold
80 should offend no unbiased observer. And the same should hold true for Chess compared with Go, but regrettably it almost invariably does not. Chess is
81 interesting in its own right and has many assets, but when all of its attributes are stacked up against those of Go it necessarily ranks second best! The problem is
84 <P>What most chessplayers share in this regard is that they are so convinced of the superiority of their game that, almost invariably with at best meager knowledge
85 of Go gained almost entirely by hearsay, they dismiss the entire idea without even exhibiting a willingness to find out for themselves. This is the very problem
87 section of this web page entitled "How Go Came To America". Maintaining this close-minded posture is any chessplayer's absolute right, of course, but its sad
88 consequence is that it unnecessarily cuts them off from one of life's greatest purely intellectual challenges and pleasures. Perhaps an even worse loss as a result
89 of their narrow perspective, those chessplayers of my acquaintance who <U>have</U> put forth the effort to study Go report that it has improved their chess, so this is
90 yet another detriment that those who display this "head-in-the-sand" attitude sustain. Hopefully those of you who are reading this do not wear those same
93 <P>Finally, there is this perhaps most cogent comment on the comparison between Chess and Go that appeared in an article in The New York Times Metro Section
94 of Thursday February 6, 2003 entitled "Queen, Captured by Mouse", which focused on the then ongoing tied match between Gary Kasparov and the Israeli
95 Chess software program "Deep Junior". That article featured the cogent quote by Dr. Hans Berliner that appears below, whose relevance can only be fully appreciated if you understand
96 Berliner's background and outstanding credentials in the field. These were spelled out in NY Times Bridge columnist Phillip Alder's column on Saturday, Nov 4, 2006 as follows:
99 Berliner won the 1956 Eastern States open Chess Championship ahead of Bobby Fischer. But he gave up tournament chess to become the world's leading correspondence player,
102 During the early stages of writing the chess program, Berliner realized that not enough was known about positional evaluation. So he turned to Backgammon. The result was BKG 9.8,
103 the first computer program to beat a World Champion in any game when it won a backgammon match against Luigi Villa in June 1979. This research led, in 1984, to a chess program called HiTech.
109 "You don't have to be really good anymore to get good results. Chess is winding down.....What's happening with Chess is that it's gradually losing its place as
110 the par excellence of intellectual activity". And he concluded: "Smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called Go..."</P>
374 <P>(1) It has been my experience that most chessplayers strongly dispute the contention that chess is primarily a left brain function while Go integrates both left and
375 right brain, and absent any research studies specifically designed to explore this issue it was formerly impossible to definitively resolve it. But now at last one
402 <P>GO is a board game thought to be different from chess in many aspects, most significantly in that GO emphasizes global strategy more than local battle, a
403 property very difficult for computer programs to emulate. To investigate the neural basis of GO, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to
404 measure brain activities of subjects engaged in playing GO. Enhanced activations were observed in many cortical areas, such as dorsal prefrontal, parietal,
407 <P>Quantitative analysis indicated a modest degree of stronger activation in right parietal area than in left. This type of right hemisphere lateralization differs from
412 <p>(2) At first blush, the idea of a draw is superficially appealing! After all, if two opponents are really almost exactly equal in strength, why should the result of
413 their encounter be that one gets a full point and the other gets nothing? Especially if no obviously egregious errors have been made, it seems fairer that they split the
414 point evenly. But upon deeper introspection, that idea begins to fall apart. And this is something that most chessplayers implicitly acknowledge, but then act as though
415 they were either oblivious to or deliberately choose to ignore as less than significant. That this attitude is at best mistaken was made abundantly clear by Robert Byrne,
418 <p>“Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, won the Super GM Tournament in Linares, Spain, held from Feb. 19 to March 5. He scored 7-5 in the elite seven-entrant
419 double-round-robin invitational event. Peter Leko and Garry Kasparov tied for second with 61/2 -51/2. It is the greatest satisfaction in the game to be No.1 in a tourney
420 where everyone is at the top of the world rankings. That having been said, this competition had only nine decisive encounters. All the rest were draws.”
422 <p>Translating Byrne’s statement a bit to make clearer the point he’s making, we see that of a total of 84 games contested a full 89% resulted in a draw! And how many of
423 those were actually infamous “grandmaster draws”, in which the opponents, wary of each other’s skills and unwilling to risk a loss, really only “go through the motions”
424 for a few desultory moves and then quickly agree to a face saving draw, isn’t revealed. The fact that Byrne even explicitly pointed this out is, I believe, ample proof
425 that even among the most ardent chess lovers this remains a serious intrinsic flaw that greatly diminishes both the game’s integrity and the satisfaction its players derive
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