Chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky to Battle Chess Computer
Saturday, July 19 at 10:30 AM in the Mansion Conference Room
Crystal Springs Uplands School (CSUS) is hosting a unique chess event featuring Grandmaster and Crystal alumnus, Daniel Naroditsky (CSUS '14). Naroditsky will play a match against a chess computer, This event will be hosted by computer scientists and chess enthusiasts Jesse Levinson (CSUS '01) and Tyson Mao (CSUS '02).
What's it all about? In 1996, IBM's Deep Blue defeated then World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match. Kasparov's defeat marked the end of human dominance in chess. In fact, the last time a human has defeated a computer in a public match was November of 2005. Computer chess has advanced significantly. Whereas Kasparov's 1996 match was against specifically designed hardware that took millions of dollars of research and development, today, even low end mobile devices can defeat the top humans. So what chance does Daniel Naroditsky have?
Curiosity got the best of Levinson and Mao, and they are attempting to answer the following question: can a human add any value to a chess computer? In other words, will the combination of Daniel and a computer be better than a more powerful computer alone? To test this, they are staging the following four game chess match: GM Naroditsky, aided with a laptop from 2008 and the Rybka 3 chess engine (the top chess engine when it was released in 2008), versus a modern Mac Pro running the open-source Stockfish chess engine.
The match will consist of four games played at G/45 + 30 second increment time controls. GM Naroditsky will receive $2,000 for winning the match, $500 for drawing the match, and $200 for losing the match.