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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

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danieltillett·

Well since Komodo will kick the butt of any human it played is it not the real world champion?

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Only in the sense that a team of 11 Ford pickups would be the NFL champion.

A better example would be a motorcycle vs. Lance Armstrong.

Or Lance Armstrong vs an unassisted human.

Not really. A motorcycle can't ride a bicycle any more than a Ford pickup can play football.

Computer programs can play chess better than humans, following the same rules that humans do.

Humans usually cannot take books or a printed compilation of all the chess games in history, while computers have a database with a lot of chess games. If humans could take a whole library with them to the match, things would be different, but then, the reading/writing speed of a computer is much higher then the human reading/writing speed, so I think the comparison between human muscles and a gasoline engine is fair. Kasparov playing with no time limit and his whole library at hand would still be a match for any computer.

I'm sorry you've been voted down, because yours is a common misconception. No human player can beat the modern chess engines even running on a smartphone without an opening book.

It's incredible how quickly game engines have advanced. Way back in 2007 Rybka destroyed all human challengers without an opening book. The current chess engines are much stronger and running on much faster hardware. There's simply no comparison any more.

There's no chess rule stating that a human cannot memorize large opening tables.

Ford pickups can't play football.

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