Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Sign of the Times - Using Technology to Cheat

Cheating at chess is making more headlines. Today CNET, a site that covers technology news reports the following:

Checkmate for Indian chess player after phone ploy "Caught using his mobile phone's wireless device to win games, player is banned from competition for 10 years."

I'm not sure there will be anyway to stop this now that computers can beat the world champion. The possibilities for relaying computer moves to a player whether electronically or through some other means (pre-arranged codes or signals) may make competitive chess events impossible to hold.

As much as I embrace technology, there are times when I long for the good old days when chess expertise was a skill and talent possessed only by human beings and not machines.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree! I have romanticized chess in my heart for years and technology is poised to strip it all away. I hope your health is holding up and I look forward to being a regular reader of your fine blog. Have a great new year!

Edwin 'dutchdefence' Meyer said...

Hello there Rook :-)

I guess you are allready aware of the fact that there's a whole chess blogging (in search of improvement) community out there on the web, including me ;-)

Your's will make a nice addition :-)

I will add you to my sidebar and keep track of your posts. Maybe we can learn from one another ;-)

Feel free to add me to your sidebar. My WordPress blog that is.

Take care!

Rook Van Winkle said...

Hello dutchdefence!

Your excellent blog was one of the very first I came across in my search to improve my game.

There was (and is) a tremendous amount of useful information at your blog and it served as an inspiration for this blog - strange how it has come full circle with you addding a comment to my site!

I highly recommend to anyone reading this comment that they check your blog out and I will be happy to add a link to it in my sidebar.

-Rook Van Winkle

Edwin 'dutchdefence' Meyer said...

"Your excellent blog was one of the very first I came across in my search to improve my game.

There was (and is) a tremendous amount of useful information at your blog and it served as an inspiration for this blog - strange how it has come full circle with you addding a comment to my site!

I highly recommend to anyone reading this comment that they check your blog out..."

Phew! But seriously, that is too much honour for me. I personally think of my blog as nothing special. There are a lot of better ones out there. But then again, i've always been known to criticize myself and the thing's i do.

"strange how it has come full circle with you addding a comment to my site!"

Eventually we all come full circle ;-)

Hope to be blogging again soon.