The fact that Nemeth, for his strength at 2100+, literally destroys far superior-rated computers is phenomenal. It's akin to a human daring a car to a foot race and figuring out a way to win the race.

Moreso because it's a card game their is much less variety then in chess and I'm confident a maximal solution could be found and used by normal desktop PCs while chess is still a long way from being solved.

The Nemeth gambit only works on computers because Nemeth knows how comps are programmed and exploits the weaknesses in the programming

you can check this link :
http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/...
(it's already posted above)

Computers screwed up the first three games shown in the article due to obvious programming errors, which are easy to correct anyway. You won't find a state-of-the-art engine with a proper database making errors like those, so they prove nothing.

As for the next 10 Nemeth and one Krabbé games, I wonder how many hundreds of games they had played before they could come up with those 11 won. Reminds me of my own collection, as I have a tendency to save only my won games against the machine (oh, and I even tamper with the settings in my favor, otherwise I'd get toasted all the time), but at least I don't put a loud fanfare behind it and upload it to my web page in defense of humanity.

The whole point of that article is ridiculous anyway. Who needs to defend humanity's honor against machines? Computers were created for the very purpose to solve and excel at problems that are impossible, or just too tedious to humans! Will this guy also write a page defending sprinters against racing cars? Ehh.

Computers have been around for a while, and played numerous matches against humans, losing many in the beginning, but they were always better at sportsmanship. Never heard of a comp making stupid excuses to cover for its losses, or going into raptures over its victories, two things that some humans tend to do an awful lot. I don't care if computers are better at chess, but they seem to be better also at some virtues that are supposed to be inherently human--and that's what's humiliating to us.

<a Hydra-Nemeth match? That would be something to see.>

That's true, but for a reasonably well-written program all of the design/programming faults manifest themselves through the improper use of the product. For instance, in the UNIX world the most common examples are the infamous buffer overflow exploits. (I deliberately avoid talking about Windows-related problems, as that is a huge design flaw on its own, rather than a software.) For someone who is communicating with a program through a chess interface, able to make only legal moves, the possibilities for exploits you are talking about are practically eliminated.

The only thing Nemeth--or any chessplayer for that matter--can do is to find shortcomings of the algorithm--and those aren't the same as errors in the code which hackers would exploit. Turning the shortcomings to your advantage may enable you to beat programs which are nominally 2-300 ELO points higher than you, but the enormous 700+ points gap between Hydra and Nemeth is just too big. No way.

<it would be a fine publicity stunt to highlight the sloppiness and bugginess of virtually all commercial software.>

Then your best hope is that during the next Hydra-Human match a hacker cracks the mainframe via Internet, and makes the computer play imbecile moves, or just resign in a won position. I agree, that would be a good demonstration about buggy software--but this has nothing to do with the playing strength of Hydra, so long as everyone plays according to the rules.

<I have more chance of convincing Christina Aguilera to marry me and have my babies>

Fritz, Shredder etc are only 300 ELO better than Nemeth? I think not. Obviously Nemeth was playing around with these programs to come up with the techniques he's found and he would probably need a fair time playing around with Hydra to if he was to discover anything, but I don't think we can totally discount the possibility. Check this out for absurdity http://f27.parsimony.net/forum67838...