

The Chess Master and the Computer (by Garry Kasparov) - michael_nielsen
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

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mark_h
The most interesting part of this for me was at the very end, where he
mentions a trend of chess masters taking up poker instead; has anyone else
heard of this?

It isn't really explained, except in association with the earlier paragraph
comparing the complete-information, brute-force-able game of chess to a game
which involves probabilities, bluffing, etc. This obviously makes it a more
interesting problem these days for researchers, but it's the first I've heard
of it being a human trend too. Unless, of course, it's just about the money,
which is also hinted at.

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ca98am79
Yes, many tournament chess players have turned to poker because it is another
great competitive game, but can make you a lot more money. Ylon Schwartz is a
Fide rated chess master and made $3,763,515 by coming in 4th in the 2008 World
Series of Poker. He would not be able to make a living from chess.

~~~
ca98am79
Here's a blog post I wrote about it, which includes a video with Ylon talking
about chess and poker: [http://www.uglychart.com/2008/11/03/ylon-schwartz-
poker-play...](http://www.uglychart.com/2008/11/03/ylon-schwartz-poker-player-
and-fide-master/)

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mindblink
The fascinating part for me is toward the end of the article where he talked
about the 2005 Playchess.com competition, in which teams of humans are free to
use computers to compete in Chess. To everyone's surprise, a team of amateurs
with 3 cheap computer won against both stand-alone computers and Grandmasters
with state-of-the art computers.

His take away message: "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to
a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human +
machine + inferior process".

I see this trend going on in AI for the long time, where the best use of
development goes to augmenting human intelligence rather than supplanting it.

