WHEN it comes to chess, computers are a bit like people. As the world鈥檚 top players battled for the FIDE world chess title this week, the best chess-playing computers also faced off across the board at the Computer Chess World Championships in Israel.
The winner was a particularly aggressive and daring program called Junior, which had won the title in 1997, 2001 and 2002. It claimed the crown on 12 July by beating the defending champion, a program called Shredder, in a tense last round of games.
Junior is prone to making human-style blunders because, unlike other leading programs, it places less emphasis on the value of individual pieces than factors such as mobility and positional advantage, an approach known as 鈥渃ompensation鈥�.
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