a member calling himself oldyellowcat,


Pay attention to the last sentence please....
After playing with CM11, Fritz and Rybka extensively in the past few weeks, I am feeling quite pessimistic.
IMHO: it is only a matter of time before Chess computers completely crush even the best human players.
The fact is that although quite large, the total of chess variations is still a finite number, and the raw computing power of machines doubles every 18 months or so and the software gets smarter and smarter.
Many of us still remember the game between Kasparov and Deep Blue ten years ago. At that time it was a special machine running special software.
Now every single laptop can run Fritz or Rybka, which are $50 to $100 bucks, and beat 99.99% of us.
The most recent top level match is Kramnik vs Deep Fritz (4-4 draw).
I don't if any top players challenged Rybka yet. Should be interesting to see as it is even stronger than Fritz.
We have a lots of human weaknesses --- we get tired after six or seven hours of the game, we overlook stuff from time to time, and bring emotions to the table and they may hurt our play. And inevitably, we grow old and we lost our brain power gradually. Computes do not have any of these.
I guess in another 10 years maybe, computers will dominate this game leaving even top players absolutely no chance.
Shall we abandon this game? Or ...instead of playing, everybody starts to devote all energy to write better chess programs.