Word: chess
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...Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry...
...indistinct Greek deity, 9 1/ 2- ft. chess pieces and 28,000 magazines are among the items on view in three fine sculpture shows...
...telephone line. While Hitech "thinks," Berliner watches the moves being considered as they scroll rapidly down the laptop's screen. In one second, Hitech can analyze as many as 160,000 possibilities. "Hitech," beams Berliner through thick-framed glasses, "is two orders of magnitude smarter than any other computer chess player in the world...
...fact, Hitech is so smart it disdains playing its fellow computers. Since 1986, Hitech has been competing on the regular chess circuit, matching wits only with humans. It has a solid master's rating of 2376, well behind former World Chess Champion Mikhail Tal, the top-ranked player in this tournament, with a 2700 rating, but Hitech is a dangerous enough competitor to have caused a minor furor last August by scoring a first-place finish in the Pennsylvania State Chess Championship. It is the 22nd-ranked player in the National Open...
Burke is a good-humored loser. "I lost to the box," he says, as he hands in his scorecard. "If it reaches the point where a computer becomes the world chess champion, I guess that would take some of the fun out of the game. But then I suppose we'd all get used to it as just one more thing computers can do better than us." Will a computer ever threaten the likes of Gary Kasparov? "No," argues former World Champ Tal. "Chess cannot be put down simply as algorithms. Chess takes imagination. The computer does not have imagination...