[Knockwurst]

[ QUOTE ]
CHESS
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Yes, there were some strange occurences in the game where
Kasparov missed a fantastic draw against Deep Blue on the
Black side of the Ruy Lopez (e.g., how could a "bot"
overlook that a king move, although natural to a human
player, was a blunder that would lead to a repetition of
position?) although I still have some doubts. If I had to
choose whether if IBM had put in a human player at some
points of the match (or overruled the move that Deep Blue
chose) or if they did not, unfortunately, I think they did
for this game for at least two moves!

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The hand of Joel Benjamin may or may not have played a part in the match. But that's really incidental, because all that means is that there was a bug or problem in the program that did not allow it to see/calculate that variation, which could be addressed by improving the program or the hardware. There was nothing inherent about the positions that I'm aware of that allowed a human to find the best move where a computer could not. Though on that day that computer did not.


[ QUOTE ]
I totally agree that if you take two best "bots" and the eight best correspondence players of the world (now) to
play a double round-robin, I am very confident that a bot
would not win the tournament. Also, I wouldn't be surprised
at all if both bots had a minus score. [And I wouldn't be
surprised if many OTB world class human chess players would
have a minus score!]

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I don't see why a computer like deep blue running for as long as it takes for a correspondance player to make a move wouldn't out calculate and beat the correspondance player. Chess is utlimately calculating various analysis trees, opening theory and end game theory are just short cuts. On what basis would a human have any advantage?