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Roberto Lavieri wrote on Fri, Jul 1, 2005 01:33 PM UTC:
G.M. Michael Adams was trounced 5.5–0.5 by Hydra, the new Chess
super-machine player. This machine is said to be unbeatable, we have to
see the next matchs against humans. Hydra is one reason to believe that
Chess needs a fast evolution. Chess can mantain its popularity for a long
time, but many people can begin to think on other games in which humans
can be competitive. The problem with Chess is that this game has been
over-studied, and its whole essence has been completely extracted. You put
on the carpet other game, and software-hardware designers are going to need
many years to produce an extremely high-level electronic player. You put on
scene a Meta-Chess idea, like we do in TCVP, and, perhaps, we can expect
powerful machine competitors, but, very probably, not unbeateble in each
type of game, because extreme high level software is, usually, based on a
theory developed through many years and positional evaluations product of
many years of observations, additioned with brut force, but brut force
alone is not enough in the majority of cases in which the game in question
is deep enough, balanced and not trivial in its positional evaluation.

Roberto Lavieri wrote on Fri, Jul 1, 2005 02:21 PM UTC:
How strong is Hydra?. Well, this super-computer/software has never been
beated, neither by humans nor by machines. He demolished the strongest
programs in the world in the PADERBORN Tournament, with an impactant
almost-perfect score: Hydra won all its games except one, including
against Fritz, and it only conceeded a draw against Schredder, but in
other tests Hydra mauled Schredder too. Now it is in project AUGMENT the
power of Hydra. Actually, Hydra is an optimized-to-play device with 64
parallel computers with specially designed processors, and the plan in
multiply the number by two. Hydra ELO may be close to 3000 at this moment,
but it can be higher after the new projected improvements...

Andreas Kaufmann wrote on Sat, Jul 2, 2005 09:24 PM UTC:
After this match with Adams is especially amazing failure of Hydra in <a href=http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2461>Freestyle Chess Tournament</a>, where human players were allowed to consult computers. Hydra didn't even made it into quarter-finals and the winners were two amateur players, not even masters, who used three average desktop computers!

Roberto Lavieri wrote on Sat, Jul 2, 2005 11:53 PM UTC:
Yes, I have read it after my last comment. In discharge, I reproduce the
Hydra team arguments:'... we played with a very new version of Hydra
Scylla that had been installed two days before the start of the event. It
was not fully tested, and that influenced the results of Hydra Scylla in
the Freestyle tournament....'. But a human with computer aid has proved
being terrific. The winners, two amateurs with ELO ratings around 1300 and
1600 respectively,  have not explained their methods neither the programs
used, they have said they used three computers, that is all, but it was
said somewhere the suspect that a very, very strong grand-master
(Kasparov?) was behind the group, at least offering some help when it was
needed.

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