vladimir kramnik
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Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik faces off against a robotic arm in a game of blitz chess
Robots and artificial intelligence are no stranger to chess, but it's not every day you get to witness an actual, fiery game of blitz chess between a World Champion and a robotic arm. Vladimir Kramnik, who was World Chess Champion from 2006 to 2007, seems to take the game pretty casually, but the robo-arm's quick, decisive moves feel just a little threatening to us. We get it, you're a robot, you don't have to go shouting it from the rooftops!
Computer beats world chess champion, moving on to poker and go
Well, it appears that our days as a species of lording supreme in the world of chess have pretty definitively come to an end. A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik (pictured), the reigning world chess champion, and the computer Deep Fritz, has just concluded. Kramnik lost, 4-2 to the multi-processor version of Chessbase's commercial software in Bonn, Germany. (To Kramnik's credit, in 2002, he'd held Deep Fritz to a draw.) However, this match may end interest in further advancing the field of chess-playing computers, according to Monty Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill University. Newborn, one of the people who organized the match, told The New York Times: "I don't know what one could get out of it at this point. The science is done." But don't think the story ends there, as Newborn added: "If you are interested in programming computers so that they compete in games, the two interesting ones are poker and go. That is where the action is." So watch out, World Series of Poker card sharks, there's about to be a digital throwdown comin' your way.
