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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.

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