Match Over: Fritz ties Kasparov

Yawn. The last game was the least interesting of the bunch. Drawn quickly.

Kasparov vs X3D Fritz match finishes 2-2 after game four draw
Chessbase News

Game four ended in a draw and with it the X3D Man-Machine World Chess Championship match also ended in draw. X3D Fritz won game two, Kasparov won game three, and games one and four were drawn. Kasparov receives $175,000 for the result and also takes home the golden trophy. (Although since it drew the match X3D Fritz said it was going to store a virtual reality copy of the trophy for itself.)

As I said last time, the time has not yet come whent he machines completely dominate the humans. Maybe in a few more years.

One more more general comment on the match though. It is really nice of X3D to sponsor these things. But the whole 3D thing is BS. For being a third party looking at the game, the 2D board is much better. The 3D boards in all kinds of commercial chess games are there as gimmicks, but nobody would actually use them to play a game! That would be crazy! It is much harder to see what is going on.

Gary is being a real sport (despite his usual whining excuse making when he loses) in playing with the 3D board at all. It is clearly a disadvantage. I don’t see why anybody would ever want to play like that.

They need to work toward complete computer independance in these games. Let the computer use a real board and clock. Let it use a robot arm or something to move the pieces. And let it make its own decisions about draws and resignations. And oh yeah, give it all the opening book you want, but handlers shouldn’t have any influence game by game on which openings it uses.

It would be even cooler to turn the opening book off entirely. I gather right now that costs several hundered rating points if they do that. But eventually the machines hopefully will be good enough that they don’t need it and can come up with new opening theory of their own.

Anyway, it was a fun match. Thanks to Brandy for going to two of the four games with me.

I’ll be ready to go again next year if they do this again!