Prof. Natan Netanyahu, from Bar-Ilan: "Computer games will advance the technological front"

During the competition, which was held this year for the first time in Israel, "Deep Junior" did not lose in any of the 11 rounds and scored nine points. The Israeli software has won the title three times in the past and ended in a tie the match held last year in New York against the master Garry Kasparov.

The Israeli software "Deep Junior", developed by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, is the winner of the World Computer Chess Championship, which closed on Monday. During the competition, which was held this year for the first time in Israel, "Deep Junior" did not lose in any of the 11 rounds and scored nine points. The Israeli software has won the title three times in the past and ended in a tie the match held last year in New York against the master Garry Kasparov.

The competition was held at Bar Ilan University last week as part of the 12th championship of the International Computer Games Association (ICGA), which has been held for the past 30 years around the world, with the participation of 14 chess programs from Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, Germany and other countries. The contestants competed among themselves for the title of the world championship, without human intervention, with some of the developers participating in the competition remotely, via the Internet. The games were broadcast live on the PlayChess website, in front of an audience of chess lovers around the world, with the addition of comments and commentary by the great master Boris Alterman.
Prof. Natan Netanyahu, Bar-Ilan University, one of the organizers of the World Computer Chess Championship, how many - how many, who won the competition?
"The World Computer Chess Championship, which was held for the first time in Israel in thirty years, ended yesterday with the victory of the Israeli software "Dip-Junior", developed by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. This is their fourth win of the years in the world championship title. As you may remember, last year Deep Junior ended a fascinating duel against Rabbi Amen, Garry Kasparov, in a 3-3 draw. The German software "Schroeder", the outgoing world champion, finished in second place, and the Dutch software, "Deep" finished in third place. The German-Dutch software, "Fritz", which was ranked second on the eve of the championship and which previously successfully faced Vladimir Kramnik (4-4) and Garry Kasparov (2-2), finished in fourth place only, jointly with the American software, "Crafty".

What is the share of the programs and participants from Israel in the competition?
"The championship was held for eight days at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University. 14 programs from around the world participated in it. Apart from Deep-Junior, Israel was represented by two other programs: "Falcon" developed by Omid Tabibi, a master's student in the computer science department at Bar-Ilan University, which finished in 7-9 places, and "Mobiy" developed by Uri Blas, who has a Ph.D. in statistics from Tel Aviv University, which finished in 11-12 places. It was the first time that three blue-white programs represented Israel in such an event"

- What characterizes the software?
"The dramatic and fascinating championship marked the narrowing of the gap between the leading programs, Schroeder, Fritz and Deep-Junior, and the rest of the programs. This trend was manifested in a special way in the last round in which Falcon ended its match with Schroeder in an impressive draw, which actually crowned Deep-Junior as the world champion. Another trend that characterized the current championship was the increasing use of multiple parallel processors. Specifically, the first five programs ran on parallel computers with four AMD processors.

At the same time as the World Computer Chess Championship, Bar-Ilan University also hosted the "Computers and Games" international conference and the Thinking Games Olympiad, where different software competed in different thinking games such as Go, Chinese chess and even backgammon.

In conclusion, Prof. Natan Netanyahu, you are a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence in the computer science department at Bar-Ilan, how can computer games be applied to other fields?
"Chess software performs efficient filtering over a search tree corresponding to a huge number of positions on the chessboard. The software combines various algorithms such as heuristic search, learning and planning with knowledge bases and human expertise to realize an expert system with the highest level of intelligence performance. The experience gained in the field of thinking games using a computer and in computer-chess in particular, may also be used in other fields and applications in the field of artificial intelligence and thereby advance the research and technological front."