Israeli Grandmaster Boris Alterman is a friend of mine. We worked together at KasparovChess.com in Israel and for several years afterwards after I moved to New York. It was great to see him again now that he's here for the Kasparov-Deep Junior match. For several years now he has worked as 'trainer' to Junior, providing feedback to its programmers and tuning its opening book.
His job description needs to undergo a radical revision. Not because he's bad at what he does, but because his job is being made obsolete, like a telegraph operator or bank teller. Against a top-level GM like Kasparov, it's simply too hard to patch up all the holes in an opening book. Programs are strong enough now that they should be taught how to play the opening themselves so they don't fall into holes like DJ did in game one against Kasparov. The first program that can do this well will have a big advantage over other programs as well as against humans. In the beginning there will be hybrid programs that have a book, but evaluate the lines before playing from it. Some programs already 'tune' their books themselves as preparation, but this clearly isn't good enough.
A big photo gallery and DJ-GK reports are at ChessBase.com.
