Chess: Fun Is Over!

December 10, 2006

The world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik lost a six-game chess match against Deep Fritz 4 games to 2.

I think computers are better than humans in playing chess now. So what, no fun anymore! - Let computers do some more useful things, like keeping the household or washing our clothes … or writing software (what one of my school teacher predicted for the year 2000, haha).

Kramnik played a six game match against the computer program Deep Fritz in Bonn, Germany from November 25 to December 5, 2006, losing 2-4 to the machine, with 2 losses and 4 draws. He received 500,000 Euros
for playing and would have gotten another 500,000 Euros had he won the
match. Deep Fritz version 10 ran on a computer containing two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. Kramnik received a copy of the program in mid-October for testing, but the final version included an updated opening book.^[3] Except for limited updates to the opening book, the program may not be changed during the course of the match. The endgame tablebases used by the program were restricted to 5 pieces^[4] even though a complete 6 piece tablebase is widely available.