[Alberta's Child]

Mr Kasparov made much of the notion that he was defending humanity's honour; Newsweek called the contest “the brain's last stand”.

Oh, please.

I don't think humanity is any worse off just because the world's greatest distance runners would finish the Daytona 500 about 180 laps behind Sterlin Marlin or Dale Jarrett.

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Oh, please. I don't think humanity is any worse off just because the world's greatest distance runners would finish the Daytona 500 about 180 laps behind Sterlin Marlin or Dale Jarrett.

Continuing my earlier point, this is why I would love to see a match-up between Bobby Fischer and Deep Blue.

According to IBM's own development notes, Deep Blue was designed to beat Kasparov in the 1997 match-up. IBM brought in dozens of defeated Grand Masters to meet with the Programming Team and asked them, "How does Kasparov play?" The object was not to figure out why these Grand Masters beat Kasparov (most of them hadn't), but why did they lose? And thereby, to specifically design a computer program which anticipated Kasparov's strengths, and compensated in advance.

This wouldn't work against Fischer. We are talking about an idiot savant who by the age of thirteen would sacrifice his QUEEN, to no apparent Logical Advantage whatsoever, against the strongest American players just to prove a point -- "You foolish Mortals are mere putty in my hands".

• Was the Queen-sacrifice the brilliant work of a young Blaise Pascal who anticipated an advantage many iterations in advance of even the best of his opponents?
• Or was it merely a casual "throwaway" on Fischer's part -- just to give the poor Grand Masters a "fighting chance", so as to make it interesting for his own insane tastes?

I'm far too stupid to know, and Bobby Fischer is a bit too kooky to tell us.