FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for January 26, 2011

Never ‘play’ chess with a computer!

“Chess is not a game. Chess is a well defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position.” – Johnny von Neumann ( and he ought to know, he wrote the book on the Theory of Games! )

And computers are a LOT better at trying ten thousand ‘plays’ in a minute until they find the best move for any position. So you either have to constrain the computer so it makes STUPID moves, or its almost impossible to beat.

Play chess with a computer? I’m still trying to beat the chicken at tic-tac-toe As Don Imus would say “Well the chicken got first move.”

Actually I found some chess playing programs that are pretty bad in the end game, if I can get past the opening and the middle game, I can usually beat it.

Oh that looks like loads of fun.

What’s up with Roger using the old PC. Didn’t this strip upgrade to a new computer a few months back?

@DaveinSC…. this is the “Classics” strip, and if you can enlarge your view, you’ll see this segment was originally printed in 2000…. back in the original heyday of the iFruit (iMac). The new compy is in the Sunday version.

VonNeumann’s “Theory of games” didn’t (and doesn’t) have much to do with chess. And while his statement might be theoretically true (in fact, he even says so - “in theory”, remember), analyzing any chess position with a full set of players on the board is only simple at the first level. Try analyzing a position seven or eight moves deep, and you’ll find that it’s more than even the best of modern computers can do.

A computer beat me at chess once, but it was no match for me at kick boxing

by Who Knows?

us lousy players refer to you good players as eggheads or something equally silly

Way too many calculations for most computers to do at the start, but narrows down the more pieces that are gone.

But yes, computers cheat, or rather programmers cheat for most computer games because programming good ai is ridiculously hard, even more so now. So give them improved speed, damage, etc.