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  • Does Chess Need to be Crowdsourced?

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Thursday, October 4th, 2007

    picture-185.pngA new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).

    I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?

    Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?

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