Hacker News Reader

Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Afaik, I thought the engineers running the machine were reprogramming during the game to handle changes in Kasparov's technique. Please someone with more knowledge chime in, but from my memory it was more like he was competing against computationally augmented human opponent. He wasn't beaten by a computer, he was beaten by a team of engineers using a computer.

some corroboration on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)

View on HN

Not reprogramming during any game, but during the match (between games). You can argue about how much influence this has, in my mind though he was beaten by highly similar variants of a computer program (not quite a fixed concept, but not adjusted too much during the match).

Kasparov also complained that he was never allowed to see any logs or previous games by Deep Blue ahead of the match. If he was playing another GM, there would have been hundreds of games available where he could get a feeling for the player's preferences. Preparing for such a high level match necessarily requires such preparations.

He should have made his participation conditional on being shown previous games. I'm pretty sure everybody outside of IBM would have considered that fair.

IBM reminds me of a kid at school that would play everybody that was playing chess up until the point where he'd win once against them. Then he'd run off and spout to everybody that he was now better than 'x'. The rematch offer was pretty lame after the cheating accusations, they should have addressed those first. No rematch given those conditions, no prior data -> no fair victory.

If IBM wanted to do this fairly they'd give Kasparov at least as much data on Deep Blue as they had on Kasparov.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com