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Comment by judofyr | Hacker News Reader

> When the AI is strong enough, we’ll invite an actual french Chess Grand Master along with a Guinness official for the most epic Chess game, ever!

Ehm, what makes this so epic? Computers have been known to beat humans at chess for quite a while now.

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Its gotten so bad (good) that cell phones are now playing at GM levels. Kind of depressing, but inevitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-computer_chess_matches#Po...

Yes, it's astounding (if true) that Pocket Fritz only searches 20k nodes per second, compared to Deep Blue's 200M. There must be some serious positional intelligence involved there!

Simple improvements in the tree search algorithms to reduce the effective branching factor are enough. Those have exponential effects.

Improving the evaluation function is "merely" a constant improvement.

Your average GM is also not Gary Kasparov. The difference between a typical GM and one of the handful of elites is pretty astounding.

For a graphical grasp of this concept, take a bell curve, and then plot only the top 0.1% of the bell curve. That's the distribution of abilities among people who are any good at all at chess, and it is no longer anything close to a bell curve.

Well, enthusiasm was clearly speaking here but you can consider it epic in that one player will be thrown against potentially "all" the computers of the world. Kind of a "Man vs. Grid" thing.

But yes, in terms of pure strength, nothing epic for now :)

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