Since baseball is more about athletic ability than chess is, I can see Vulcans beating humans every time at something like baseball. Wasn't even Spock supposed to be like 2 or 3 times stronger than Kirk? Vulcans could probably hit home runs every time.

It's not a question whether the Vulcans would have the physical advantage over Humans but rather that Vulcans would lack the competitive spirit to even see any need for participating in such game since competitiveness would be considered an emotion.

That's one emotion that Vulcans didn't seem to see a lot of reason to suppress. Starting with Spock for TOS, and the various ambassadors and T'Pol for the Enterprise series who all express obvious superiority to humans. And Sisko's rivalry with the Vulcan captain/commander had been going on for years, maybe since their Academy days. Baseball was just the latest representation, somewhere Sisko hoped to finally win.

@Nexus71 said:

Perhaps chess was the wrong example but then again in DS9 the Vulcans beat Sisko&co in a game of baseball how believable would that be?

It's funny - though Vulcans wouldn't understand why - that you mentioned the episode "Take Me Out to the Holosuite".
I posted about it here some time ago.

One of the reasons I liked that episode, was because it shows the difference in how sports (and games) are viewed.

For the Vulcans it was one more test to prove their superiority, while others, humans in particular, could laugh and have fun just by playing.
For Sisko (baseball) that was more important than winning in the end.

Probably after many losses, Kirk won this time (chess). How did that happen?

Spock, a vulcan , considers himself as infallible (logic). Did he have a 'brain lapse'?
If he thinks and plays like the present day (21st century) computer, he can loose. Computers have their weaknesses.
It could be something as simple as understanding 'positions' (in general or special ones, like 'Zugzwang') or more complex like the 'horizontal effect'.

Would Spock have reacted like Solok in the end, or just raise his eyebrow?

Remember, in the episode "Court Martial," Kirk says to Spock "You may be able to beat your next captain at chess." The obvious implication is that in the past, Spock always loses to Kirk. Not that it's necessarily credible, but that is what they say.

@Knixon said:

Remember, in the episode "Court Martial," Kirk says to Spock "You may be able to beat your next captain at chess." The obvious implication is that in the past, Spock always loses to Kirk. Not that it's necessarily credible, but that is what they say.

Of course Kirk would have won more than once. After beating some one for the first time, you'll know the weakness(es) and could exploit it to your full advantage.
Spock, playing like a computer, is predictable with weaknesses (I've mentioned), and he would be defeated on many occasions. But always?
There's also a draw (e.g. stalemate) and not every match can be won by 'illogical' moves.

I think Kirk was just teasing Spock in his usual unorthodox cheeky way

Fortunately (or was it on purpose), the word 'chess' started Spock thinking, and he used that to save Kirk.

Yes, it was fortunate in that episode. But computers were in their early days then, so it was understandable that people - TV watchers - might believe that altering a video record might somehow also affect the chess programming. Today we (hopefully) know better.

Fortunately (or was it on purpose), the word 'chess' started Spock thinking, and he used that to save Kirk.

Yep. During the trial of his Captain and closest friend, Spock is playing chess. He shouldn't have been able to beat the computer,. but he did, providing a crucial clue Cogley, a fine and impassioned speaker who came up with nothing on his own. So, the question is, how many times does Spock need to beat the computer to prove it has been tampered with? Once? Twice? Surely no more than thrice? Yet Spock lingered over the games, winning five times in all. and it takes McCoy spurring him to action to get him to stop playing chess and start saving Kirk.

Spock's evidence helped find and catch Ben Finney, whose brilliant plan of revenge was apparently:

1. Frame Kirk for his death, and then
2. Hide out in Engineering for the rest of his life, eating dilithium crystals and cackling over Kirk's dilemma.

I enjoy "Court Martial," but there are some odd story elements. That whole "Let's beam everybody off the ship and put the court in danger" finale is very dramatic, and extremely foolish.

Especially since just the ship's sensors should have been able to find him, no need for that sound stuff.

@Knixon said:

Yes, it was fortunate in that episode. But computers were in their early days then, so it was understandable that people - TV watchers - might believe that altering a video record might somehow also affect the chess programming. Today we (hopefully) know better.

This has bugged me for quite some time, so I invented a possibility.

Spock notes that the best he should be able to do against his program is stalemate after stalemate. (Stalemates are actually kind of rare in chess, so we will assume that he meant "draw.") If this were indeed the case, then the implication is that Spock is incapable of learning from his mistakes. I refuse to accept this. If this is indeed the case, Spock has some serious issues. So, assuming that Spock learns from his mistakes, he should be able to eventually reach a state where he can continually defeat the computer's chess program.

Unless, that is, the computer also learns from its mistake. Perhaps it has a function that records and stores every single interaction that anyone ever made with the computer. This isn't unrealistic. If Spock were to program his chess game so that it can learn from its mistakes, it would have to call on this function. If this function were somehow disabled, the computer would not learn from its mistakes, and Spock would finally be able to defeat it.

This function, in addition to recording chess games, would also record any modifications made to the ship's log. Such recordings would not be in Finney's best interest. To prevent his being detected, he would have to make modifications to this function. It is entirely feasible that such modifications would adversely affect the "learning to improve" aspect of Spock's chess program.

But if you write a chess program to learn from its mistakes, it's the chess program that learns from its mistakes. Not any other part of the computer or its other programs.

It seems best to simply take it as symbolic of the general lack of understanding about computers at the time.

Every computer programming language I have worked with includes built-in functions. This is done to avoid the tedium of egregious code duplication. Some common functions include a command to print a string or a function to compute the square root of a number.

It is entirely feasible that a built-in function available on the Enterprise computer would be a command or commands to search through previous interface transactions.

If a chess game is to learn from its mistake, it must be able to access previous games. Spock could very well have used the "search transactions" function for this capability. I don't see why not.

Disabling or modifying this "search transactions" function would be in Finney's best interest.

Or, you can be lazy and write it off to a general lack of understanding about computers. I just don't find that to be very fun.

It may not be "fun," but after 40+ years of working with computers including AI programming, I find it to be entirely credible. And I don't think that "learn from your mistakes" could be any kind of system-wide function that would apply to a chess program as well as anything else.

Now, M-5 may very well have had something like that, which could have been one of its many problems. But the Enterprise computer system was only duotronic.

I didn't say that "learn from your mistakes" would be a system wide function. I said that the ability to "search transactions" would be a system wide function. Perhaps a better terminology would be "examine log".

If someone were to write a chess program which learns from its mistakes, it would have to take a look at moves made in the past and evaluate the results of such moves. This would entail using the system wide function of examining the log of previous interactions made with the computer.

If Finney were to make a change to the sequence of the events that occurred during that ion storm, it is plausible that making such changes would be automatically logged. To cover his tracks, he could make a change to the "examine log" function, which could, in turn, affect the "learn from your mistakes" routine that Spock included in his chess program.

Oh, and "duotronic" and "multitronic" don't have any concrete meaning in TOS canon.

Singin' "Doo wah ditty ditty dum ditty doo"