Thus, out of 5 games – 78% of GM Kramnik’s moves match with the first line of Fritz9 [an advanced chess computer].
That is from an official letter written by Topalov’s assistant. Of course just because someone says it, that doesn’t mean it is true.
Uh-Oh, continued
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Why choose that particular chess program? Could you find a statistic like that for every player in the tournament?
I was thinking the same thing as Kling. The best chess players in the world are choosing the dominant strategy, so you should expect a decent program’s recommendations to be highly correlated with the same moves of these players.
Or, perhaps Kramnik trained against the Fritz9 program, and was adopting the program’s strategy (consciously or unconsciously).
While cheating with Fritz would be an extremely unfair advantage, at that level, they’re better than Fritz is overall anyway. Just something to keep in mind.
Wow, Fritz is really good! 78% of the time it chooses like Kramnik did!
Kramnik doesn’t have to have access to Fritz. He only needs communications with someone who does. Even hand signals could be used to pass the move.
That said. I don’t believe he was or is cheating. His moves are often going to match Fritz. The bathroom stunt is probably just eccentric behavior – hardly new.
An analysis of Fritz v. present or past masters would be interesting. But someone would have to come out highest. And that someone is almost certain to be an active top ranked player.
What might be more revealing would be the trend over decades. Did top ranked play steadily get better? Or did it rise and ebb? Did players agree with Fritz more as the game progresses, or less?
I think it’s only fair that someone run both Topalov and Kramnik’s moves through a documented procedure against a chess engine and show the results while varying certain assumptions.
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