Can Crowd’s Wisdom Beat Chess Master?

From The Wall Street Journal May 12, 2008, 6:00 am Posted by Ben Worthen Are amateurs collectively wiser than a single expert? That’s the question the Web site CrowdChess is trying to answer. The book The Wisdom of Crowds promoted the idea that large groups are often able to make better decisions than experienced professionals. Over the last few years, that idea has been adopted as conventional wisdom: Some businesses have “crowd sourced” projects to communities; Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, grew from this notion. To put the wisdom of crowds to the test, Stan Oleynick, the founder of CrowdChess, recruited Gawain Jones, a grandmaster from England, to play against the collective intelligence of his site’s visitors. “Chess is the ultimate game of strategy and foresight,” and thus is a good test of crowd theory, Oleynick tells the Business Technology Blog. Visitors to CrowdChess propose and vote on moves. After 12 hours, the crowd makes the move with the most votes. Jones, the grandmaster, then has 12 hours to make his move. The first to take three games wins the tournament. Currently, CrowdChess is 14 turns into the first game. Jones, who is playing black, is winning, having captured the crowd’s knight. But Oleynick hopes that as more people visit his site, the crowd’s chances will improve. Now, he says, he has a few hundred participants but he’s adding more each day. (His site was recently profiled on the blog TechCrunch, which has helped increase traffic.) The game should go on for the next several weeks. Next, Oleynick hopes to pit the crowd against a supercomputer.