Because of Shredder’s huge amount of built in knowledge, he likes to sacrifice pawns for active play or getting the initiative. Very often this leads to nice and active play, but I have to admit, that sometimes Shredder’s positional advantage will fade away and that he is down a pawn for nothing after all. Luckily those cases are getting rarer and rarer but I take this into account because in general Shredder’s play gets better and more active and also successful this way. In addition this is more like modern chess is played today. The old disease of computer chess, that computers are just counting material is no longer true, there are ways to cure this.
I have much more ideas about how to make progress in computer chess. Right now I am working on an automatic combination of two different chess programs. In theory the move of the program which understands the given position better should be chosen, as it is able to produce a stronger move then. The strengths of both programs are combined and their weaknesses are avoided. Soon we will see if this is another way to improve computer chess.
I know that many people watch the progress in computer chess with great concern, maybe even more after reading this article. They fear that this is another field where computers will be superior to mankind and chess will be meaningless after we have the first nonhuman world champion. I certainly don’t agree with them since I am working to improve computer chess in the first line. Every chess player should see that there are also many advantages to have an electronic grandmaster at home. You have a chess partner or analyzing tool of any strength available at any time. Not very long ago it wasn’t easy for an average chess player to get a solid analysis of a complicated position. I don’t even want to start talking about all the advantages of electronic databases here.
In our daily life there are many electronic or mechanical things that do their job much better than any human can ever do. We got used to them and consider them as useful tools that make life easier. Beside of this we don’t pay much attention to it. I am sure that everyone can name a few such things after only a short thought. Probably we first have to get used to it, if the time has come for computers to play better chess than all human, but after a while we will certainly get used to it and take advantage of it. If there is still somebody out there thinking that his will be just another step for computers on their way to rule mankind with intelligent robots, I have to tell him, that even after long thinking I can’t think of anything in computer chess which can be transferred directly to our daily life.
In the last paragraph I have mentioned that one day computers will play stronger chess that any human. Well, I agree that you can argue about that and that there are many people around having a totally different opinion, but if you take a closer look at the development of the playing strength of both humans and computers in recent years, you have to admit, that computers have made without any doubt the much bigger step. If you also know that computer programs are getting better with a faster computer and that one cannot see the end of the development of computer hardware, you can only draw this one conclusion. But as I have mentioned earlier, one can argue about that. I am not saying that it will happen within two or three years, the exact time is very hard to predict, but I am sure that it will happen sooner or later.
I am not sure weather all of my theories stated in this article are true, but the success of my program Shredder at the computer world chess championships on inferior hardware gives some proof to this. I am not sure weather my way is the only way to go, but at least it seems that it is not completely wrong :-)