Dead Man's Chess

[Ashles]

Is there any way of comparing the processing power of computers available at the time?

Obviously the computers in 1985 had nowhere near the processing power of current chess computers, however there was a large amount of time a computer might have been able to be left dedicated to each move.

Does anyone know relatively how leaving computers of the time running on a chess game might compare with a human gamer or modern chess computer?

 

[Jimbo07]

Is there any way of comparing the processing power of computers available at the time?

Obviously the computers in 1985 had nowhere near the processing power of current chess computers, however there was a large amount of time a computer might have been able to be left dedicated to each move.

Does anyone know relatively how leaving computers of the time running on a chess game might compare with a human gamer or modern chess computer?

I played with one of those chess game toys when I was a kid, but don't remember much, so I'm going more on computing here, than the actual product. I don't think the product could be left for a certain amount of time. Products available to the casual user would probably have been best exploited by trying multiple moves and observing the results.

 

[Mark Felt]

You're absolutely right. All the baseless suppositions are true. In fact, lets go further: a toddler could have beaten Korochnoi. No, wait! Moving the pieces randomly with no knowledge of the game whatsoever would have been enough. What GM would even look at the board in a match spanning 8 years, am I right?

 

[Ashles]

Also, as previously mentioned, if you wanted to demonstrate communication from the other side at a high level - why pick this example that is so open to debate and the possibility of hoax that it becomes pointless as an exercise?

Why not contact physicists, inventors, mathematicians... People who could, given time and a new means of communication, perhaps produce new material and information. Imagine how impressive that would be.

In fact might we assume this has been attempted by psychics many times to no avail?
If not, why aren't they trying this?

Or was this a single lucky instance of a long time-span occasion of contact with the dead?
And it was wasted on a chess game.

 

[drkitten]

Is there any way of comparing the processing power of computers available at the time?

Obviously the computers in 1985 had nowhere near the processing power of current chess computers, however there was a large amount of time a computer might have been able to be left dedicated to each move.

As a general rule of thumb, the processing power of computers doubles every 18 to 24 months (Moore's Law) (footnote 1). So between 1985 and 2005 we had 20 years, or about 12-16 doublings,

2^16 is about 65,000. So computers today (well, in 2005) were about 65,000 times more powerful than the ones back then. So anything a computer today could do in a minute, a computer then could do in about a month and a half. A person with access to lots of computers (for example, a student at a well-equipped school such as MIT) would of course be able to use multiple computers and get even more processing power.

Producing grandmaster-level moves every two months does not seem to be an unreasonable challenge for a dedicated computer in 1985.

(Footnote 1) Yes, I know that's not "really" Moore's law, which refers to transistor density.

 

[JoeEllison]

Also, as previously mentioned, if you wanted to demonstrate communication from the other side at a high level - why pick this example that is so open to debate and the possibility of hoax that it becomes pointless as an exercise?

Why not contact physicists, inventors, mathematicians... People who could, given time and a new means of communication, perhaps produce new material and information. Imagine how impressive that would be.

In fact might we assume this has been attempted by psychics many times to no avail?
If not, why aren't they trying this?

Or was this a single lucky instance of a long time-span occasion of contact with the dead?
And it was wasted on a chess game.

That points out an aspect of the stupidity of belief in psychics that is rarely discussed: the utter banality of the information "from the other side" and the improbability of what is "communicated." It isn't ever anything useful and specific. Ghosts have a magical speech impediment when it comes to anything vital, or they can communicate perfectly well to convey the next chess move? The dead body or kidnapped child is "near a body of water" or "on a road that starts with an "M' or an 'H' maybe", but the psychics can hear or see the next chess move or the sex of your first-born crotch spawn perfectly? Really?

 

[Mark Felt]

That points out an aspect of the stupidity of belief in psychics that is rarely discussed: the utter banality of the information "from the other side" and the improbability of what is "communicated." It isn't ever anything useful and specific. Ghosts have a magical speech impediment when it comes to anything vital, or they can communicate perfectly well to convey the next chess move? The dead body or kidnapped child is "near a body of water" or "on a road that starts with an "M' or an 'H' maybe", but the psychics can hear or see the next chess move or the sex of your first-born crotch spawn perfectly? Really?

To be fair, if ghosts can only communicate in single letters and numbers, they're perfectly suited to playing chess. Except in how their ability stagnates, if we take the guys on the thread linked previously as qualified commentaters on chess.

 

[Ashles]

To be fair, if ghosts can only communicate in single letters and numbers,

All the better for producing some groundbreaking physics formulae.

Also I can't help feeling communicating using only numbers and letters shouldn't be a barrier from say... forming whole words.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Carl Sagan pondered these questions in "Demon Haunted World":

How is it that channelers never give us verifiable information? Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Goering about the Reichstag fire? Why don't Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books? Don't they wish future generations to have access to their masterpieces?

 

[Mark Felt]

Fermat about his Last Theorem

It was a hoax, doncha know?

 

[Ashles]

Carl Sagan pondered these questions in "Demon Haunted World":

How is it that channelers never give us verifiable information? Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Goering about the Reichstag fire? Why don't Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books? Don't they wish future generations to have access to their masterpieces?

Well for 8 years the conduit betwixt this world and the next was giving a busy signal for some reason...

 

[Foolmewunz]

I am channeling the spirit of Politeness Man, right now.

He told me, in a series of letters and numbers that I should convey the following to Malerin:

H -a -Pp-y ... B .... I rth D aY.


(Or, I'm in a different time zone, maybe, and my forum software shows the rollicking birthday icon on you posts?)

 

[Brian-M]

Is there any way of comparing the processing power of computers available at the time?

Obviously the computers in 1985 had nowhere near the processing power of current chess computers, however there was a large amount of time a computer might have been able to be left dedicated to each move.

Does anyone know relatively how leaving computers of the time running on a chess game might compare with a human gamer or modern chess computer?

One method would be clock speed. (modern computers don't give the actual clock speed any more, but equivilent clock speed, so even though the processors are much complex, clock speed is still a good indicator of processing power.)

Two months is 86400 minutes, so a 386 computer running at 25MHz for two months would be equivilent to a 2160000Mhz computer running for one minute, or a 216000Mhz computer running for 10 minutes.

It's obvious that given enough time to think, even a crappy computer can kick the ass of any human grandmaster.

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

When Grandmasters lose, they are invariably defeated by other grandmasters or prodigies who later become Grandmasters themselves (David Howell, Fabiano Caruana).

Back when I was more interested in chess (about 30 years ago?) a British GrandMaster (can't remember his name but I think he was our only one at the time - he used to appear on a series called 'The Master Game' I think) played a roomful of schoolkids 'simultaneously'. Whilst he won most of the matches he did lose one - presumably because the kid could spend a lot more time on each move in that particular game than he could and he had other games on his mind. I don't believe the kid went on to any greatness.

I am more than happy to be corrected on this as I am relying on a very old memory but, if correct, it would suggest that your 'invariably' may be overstating the case...

Anyway, there would be little evidence of Grandmasters being beaten by non-Grandmasters as such matches are presumably rare.

ETA: apologies, I should have read the rest of the thread before posting. Others have raised this point before me (and with much greater evidence than my hazy recollections) but I see the goal posts have now been moved...

 

[Cuddles]

Because playing 40 people at the same time in 6 hours is the same as playing multiple games over 8 years.

http://www.marconews.com/news/2008/apr/19/forty-players-no-match-chess-grandmaster-marco-eve/

You're absolutely right. All the baseless suppositions are true. In fact, lets go further: a toddler could have beaten Korochnoi. No, wait! Moving the pieces randomly with no knowledge of the game whatsoever would have been enough. What GM would even look at the board in a match spanning 8 years, am I right?

Since you're completely making **** up at this point, let's go for the brass ring: Korochnoi COULDN'T play chess at all! Through an astonishing coincidence, all of his random moves just happened to catapult him to 3rd place in the world. Fortunately for Korochnoi, his luck held up, and he was able to fend off the medium'ss vicious onslaught and win the game.

True story.

Hey, you're the one claiming that a dead guy talked to a conman solely in order to lose a game of chess over 8 years. Perhaps you should take a look at your own story before trying to imply that other's are making things up.

It's obvious that given enough time to think, even a crappy computer can kick the ass of any human grandmaster.

Of course, really slow computers would actually have a bigger advantage than fast ones, since by the time they made their move, the human grandmaster would be dead.

 

[ddt]

Malerin, another question - this time about those "questions" put forward to the spirit of Maróczy.

The "survivalfiles" PDF you referred to in your OP make a big fuss about the right spelling of a name: Romi or Romih. Eisenbeiss asked the "spirit" if it knew someone by the name of Romi, and the spirit answers: no, but it knew someone by the name of Romih.

However, Maróczy himself used the spelling Romi during his lifetime, see Chess Notes:

Our correspondent, Javier Asturiano Molina, comments that the Romi/Romih spelling question is relevant to the well-known ‘spiritualist’ yarn about a game between Maróczy and Korchnoi, widely discussed on the Internet and elsewhere. It may be recalled that, as a test question, the ghost of Maróczy was purportedly asked whether he recognized the name ‘Romi’. The answer that came back was negative, although he did recall having, in 1930, an opponent named ‘Romih’.

We note, though, that both ‘Romi’ and ‘Romih’ were used in chess literature while Maróczy was alive, seemingly at random. Indeed, Maróczy himself used both. To deal only with his victory over Romi/Romih at San Remo, 1930, the following versions appeared in Maróczy’s writings:

and it follows with his own write-up of that game.

Pretty stupid of Eisenbeiss & Rolans to make a big fuss about it? They're not even good at conning us.

 

[Foolmewunz]

DDT,

Yeah that seemed like a bit of the traditional flim flam man extra touches to me, too. They didn't do enough research and thought this would be really obscure sounding (and they made it sound more so), but knew that they had documents to prove that he'd played at San Remo as Romih, so could pull that rabbit out of the hat to ooohs and aaahs from the willing believers. And it worked. Witness Malerin's gob-smacked awe at the result!

As a con, this isn't even a good one. (Which might be the only thing I can say to support Malerin's belief in this hoax. e.g. ... Why didn't they do it better? To a believer this sort of dumb "error" lends credibility.)

Upon thinking about it, I want to vote Korchnoi = willingly duped but not part of it. If Viktor wanted to pull this off to convince the whole world, all he would've had to do was to play by telex or fax or even play the medium live. Get it over with in an afternoon and be absolutely awed. The whole world would've watched. As it is, it's a woo woo footnote in chess history.

 

[ddt]

Upon thinking about it, I want to vote Korchnoi = willingly duped but not part of it.

Yes, a couple of people have already commented on Korchnoi's gullibility. I also remember from the times I followed chess a bit the fuss about Karpov's parapsychologist in the audience in Linares (?), and something about yoghurt in the same match I think.

If Viktor wanted to pull this off to convince the whole world, all he would've had to do was to play by telex or fax or even play the medium live. Get it over with in an afternoon and be absolutely awed. The whole world would've watched. As it is, it's a woo woo footnote in chess history.

It's a bit of bad timing, isn't it? There's also the more recent story of an anonymous player of GM strength in an online chess forum - who some thought to be Fisher . They could have used this guy to impress the world.

BTW, have you looked at the game in more depth? Found commentaries? My chess is real rusty, but I wasn't very impressed by it.

I'd also like a second source for Hans Ree's comments - that may be in Dutch too. We only have it from a blog post which claims to copy a column of Larry Evans who cites Hans Ree. But I just read a column of Edward Winter's Chess Notes with a devastating critique of Larry Evans' columns - foremost of his sloppiness in research.

 

[Foolmewunz]

BTW, have you looked at the game in more depth? Found commentaries? My chess is real rusty, but I wasn't very impressed by it.

Honestly, I hadn't played out the game until you mentioned it. I just went through it about a minute to a move, and I found a bigger problem in the early game than the middle. Several people on the chessgames.com site mentioned the same move for Casper. #10 Seems a wasted opportunity.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1486372&kpage=1

Pause for a while before ghosty-boy's 10th move (white). Would you have just adjusted your king when there were two very good attack options available, also forcing black to cede you a lot of the center of the board? If Viktor ever thought there was a problem I'm guessing it was after 8 and 9 when he realized the opening he'd left.

The middle game is sloppy on Korchnoi's part, but then the ghost let him have his way, it would seem.

Fritz 10 (according to someone on that site) plays it out from the early position and can come out with white gaining a draw, at best. With that in mind, it's hard to see how Viktor seriously thought he might lose. "Might not win" might've been a more accurate concern, but a loss would be pretty far fetched.

 

[ddt]

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1486372&kpage=1

Pause for a while before ghosty-boy's 10th move (white). Would you have just adjusted your king when there were two very good attack options available, also forcing black to cede you a lot of the center of the board? If Viktor ever thought there was a problem I'm guessing it was after 8 and 9 when he realized the opening he'd left.

What I can find of this position is that it's not clear who has the advantage. The opening is the Poisoned Pawn Variation^WP of the Winawer/Nimzowitsch Variation in the French Defence^WP. Wiki mentions Kd1 and Ne2 as the normal answers. It's a variation that gives both parties offense possibilities.

White has to consider that black has both the possibility of Qxc3+ and Qxe5+, so the least he has to do is prevent those moves from threatening the king.

Kd1 seems to me a bit of a cop-out. Ne2 is indeed more aggressive, but the drawback is that white's King's bishop is now locked in, and can only be developed with a fianchetto. You can't first develop the bishop, because you then get 10. Lb5+, Ld7 11. Lxd7+ Kxd7+ 12. Ne2 Rxg2 and black invades on the King's flank which was white's domain, and white cannot castle on the King's side.

Qd3 seems not aggressive at all to me. Basically white blows off his attack on black's king side.

White could also do cxd4, thus protecting his e-pawn, and black cannot invade in c2 either because it's protected by the Queen. I wonder what's against that move?