Chess Golf

A sporting way to put human chess players in conflict with computers would be to borrow the golf paradigm. A sportsman should compete against other sportsmen, not against a team of grinning technicians. An appropriate event would have a field of players play simultaneous matches with identical computers. The players would be competing against each other, just as golfers compete against each other by each trying to get the best result from an inhuman adversary, a golf course.

The golf paradigm could actually be followed fairly rigorously. Numeric evaluations supplied by the computers could be used to finely grade performances. A player agreeing to a draw would tacitly acquiesce to the computer's evaluation of the final position. Losses could be compared by number of moves played before all subsequent positions are deemed "hopeless" by the computer. Thus golf's traditional four rounds would be enough to get a clear winner.

Games could be played sportingly on successive days, if desirable, since all players would be equally subject to tiredness. The duration of the games could be shortened to golf standards, if desirable, simply by reducing the computer response time, since there would not be a human/computer fairness issue.

Chess "golf" would help us keep our dignity even as computers squash us like roaches. We would learn to see computers correctly: not as people, but as golf courses, as splendid, unconquerable, green redoubts.

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