Chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky ’14 Battled Chess Computer

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What prompted Jesse and Tyson? 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.

Jesse and Tyson were curious how Daniel would fare against this more sophisticated program and asked: can a human add any value to a chess computer? In other words, would the combination of Daniel and a computer be better than a more powerful computer alone? To test this, they staged the following: 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. A win from Daniel would mean that today's top players can add significant insight to older software and overcome more modern technology. A win from the computer would suggest that modern software and hardware in the realm of chess has advanced past a point of human understanding.

The four-game match saw Daniel playing with the white pieces in games 1 and 3. In both of those games, the computer's reply to his opening move of 1. e4 was 1. e6 or the French Defense. Daniel played solidly in the opening, but was surprised when the opposing computer made a non-intuitive move. In the first game, the computer moved one of its rooks to c8. Typically in chess, one prefers to place rooks on open files, so that they influence over the entire board. Not only did the computer place its rook on a file with pawns still in the way, the computer locked the pawns in place with an advance. Daniel was outplayed by the computer in both French Defense games as white, and a Nimzo-Indian Defense as black in game 2.

Game 4 took an interesting turn. Daniel decided to play the King's Indian Defense, which was surprising to the audience both at the event and on the Internet where the games were being broadcast. The King's Indian Defense has been traditionally seen to produce positions which computers are more adept than humans. However, Daniel was able to exploit a weakness in the computer's evaluation algorithm. In positions that are closed where neither side can make progress, computers will tend to overestimate their chances. Daniel was able to salvage a draw in the last game.

Though he was defeated in the match, the community as a whole learned a number of things. For Daniel, he was introduced to the concept of open source chess software, and the strength of the Stockfish chess engine, which will now be a weapon in his training arsenal. For the community, we had a chance to witness the power of today's chess engines against a top chess player. CSUS will stage a similar match on August 23 featuring United States' top chess player and currently world ranked number 5, Hikaru Nakamura.

Thanks to Daniel, Tyson, Jesse, Art and Rita Levinson and John Draper for participating and sponsoring this event!