Saturday, June 09, 2007

A Fish To Fry...

Place your bets, folks:

In the white corner sits a Grandmaster. In each game of the match he'll have twice as much time on his clock as his opponent to begin with, and with each move he will receive three times the increment his opponent will get - and, he also knows rather a lot of opening theory. As opposed to his opponent in the black corner, who along with the time handicaps, and playing black in each game of the match, only knows theory up until move three. But: who goes by the feared name of Rybka. And there's one extra thing. These two played a match before. Then, Rybka played at pawn odds in each game (albeit with white in each game) and, won. By 5½ to 2½.

So who is your money on?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, my money’s on the player in the Black corner.

What could be really interesting is how Rybka plays the opening if it’s out of book on move four.

...The time differentials may not mean that much if Rybka is running on super-duper hardware.


Angus.

ejh said...

I meant to write a piece about how Rybka, on my computer, insists, after 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf3, on playing 3.Nc3.

Inicidentally, won't the programmers sort it so Rybka only plays responses which they know won't lead to inferior choices on moves four and five?

ejh said...

I should perhaps point out that the punter's answer to "who's your money on?" surely depends on what the odds are.

Tom Chivers said...

Is it feasible though to know a computer's responses for all possibilities in those first five moves? And yes if you look down the thread I linked to - you'll see Rybka's preference for Nc3/c6 is mentionned...

Chris Morgan said...

Perhaps Rybka shows that the better tactician you are, the more you can do without learning openings.

ejh said...

Or the less you understand about the openings, the more you need to rely on tactics?