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Domain: ai-depot.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to ai-depot.com.

Comments · 11

  1. Re:Disappointing... by d34thm0nk3y · · Score: 1 · on Sid Meier Responds

    This argument is false : for instance, look at the traditional Asian "Go" game. It has very simple rules, much simpler than Chess. If Sid's argument made sense, computer should be able to play Go very well. But the reality is that as of today, Computers cannot compete with a skilled human. Thus : there is no direct relationship between the complexity of the rules, and the difficulty to design a strong AI.

    He was simply stating that the search complexity for his game would be much larger than chess. Just as Go's search complexity is MUCH larger than Chess'. 10^170 vs 10^50 according to http://ai-depot.com/LogicGames/Go-Complexity.html

  2. Re:Programming by MrAnnoyanceToYou · · Score: 1 · on ICFP 2005 Programming Contest Results

    Basic and Pascal are easy to learn in because that's what they were designed for. Yes, they are quite limited, but they're what I learned and now I'm smrkt enough to... post... on... Slashdot............... Erm. Hrm.

    Hey, there's this language out there DESIGNED to be easy for people to learn. Erm.... Think it was Squeak. Try finding out something about that....

    And I'd say Java was easier to learn than Basic or Pascal. Just download Eclipse, unzip it, and start..... erm. Welllll..... No. Try Squeak - I didn't learn it, and I'm not sure it's what you want, but I remember there being a fat Ask Slashdot around here somewhere or possibly here somewhere or even possibly going to learn the IBM way, in java while gaming

  3. Dupe & More by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative · on Games Teaching the Basics of Programming

    1. It's a dupe

    2. New programmers may find Robocode more interesting. It allows players to actually program instead of just "learning about it".

  4. Explanation of How It Works - Kohonen Neural Nets by TwistedPants · · Score: 1 · on Searching with Images instead of Words

    Kohenen Neural Nets are probably the basis for this... I discovered this article only a short time ago. The author does some pretty impressive things with his client. I can't find the source he linked to anymore, as it's dead :( Self Organising Maps (another name for Kohonen NN's) are pretty good at figuring out stuff like this.

  5. Re:The game of Go ? by tniemueller · · Score: 5, Informative · on Kasparov Wins Game 3 Against X3D Fritz

    This gives a nice introduction to Go and AI and why it is so hard to play for a computer.

  6. Re:The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten by vbdutch · · Score: 1 · on Romancing The Rosetta Stone
    An urban legend. Check out this. Here's the quote:
    The "spirit is willing" story is a bit amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT 'howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the 'spirit is willing' example can be found in American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently - for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round).
    By the way, the rest of the site (warning: doesn't work in Mozilla), especially the project stuff is interesting as well.
  7. Re:The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten by vbdutch · · Score: 1 · on Romancing The Rosetta Stone
    An urban legend. Check out this. Here's the quote:
    The "spirit is willing" story is a bit amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT 'howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the 'spirit is willing' example can be found in American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently - for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round).
    By the way, the rest of the site (warning: doesn't work in Mozilla), especially the project stuff is interesting as well.
  8. Re:The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten by vbdutch · · Score: 1 · on Romancing The Rosetta Stone
    An urban legend. Check out this. Here's the quote:
    The "spirit is willing" story is a bit amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT 'howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the 'spirit is willing' example can be found in American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently - for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round).
    By the way, the rest of the site (warning: doesn't work in Mozilla), especially the project stuff is interesting as well.
  9. Re:About Minsky... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on AI Going Nowhere?

    Try and name an AI researcher who is not a self-important jerk...

    Let's not forget those tinkerers who don't hold academic degrees. Most of their efforts go unnoticed. Try these:
    BBE
    or
    this.

  10. Re:We can at best hope a tie.. by legLess · · Score: 5, Informative · on Kramnik Ties Fritz; Machines Not Yet Our Masters
    Blockquothe the poster:
    My bet is that [go] will prove to be even easier than chess.
    Yowza. I believe you're sincere, but you should do much more research before spouting off. You're flat-out wrong.
    Go pieces, once placed on the board, cannot move anymore. Chess pieces can still move from one place to the other. This means that as more and more Go pieces are placed on the board, there are less and less positions the computer has to consider.
    Chess has at most 40 legal moves possible for the first move; go has 361. The average chess game has 40 moves; the average go game has 6 to 8 times that.

    So yes, after each move there are fewer go positions, but after 80 stones have been placed (the average number of chess moves), there are still 281 moves possible. You have to play more than 200 moves into a go game before you have as few move possibilities as you do for your first move in chess.
    Go requires the ability to look at patterns rather than combinations.
    If by "combinations" you mean "tacics," you're incorrect. Tactics are crucial in go, and it's only by a solid understanding of tactics that strategic thinking is possible. It's true that the rules of chess tactics are more complex than go, but it's precisely this lack of rules and formulae that make go so hard for computers.

    Go's not nearly as easily quantifiable. You can tell a chess computer that the king is worth 10,000,000 pawns, the queen 9, bishops and knights 3 or 3.5. In go, however, the only thing giving value to a stone is its position on the board and its relation to other stones ... sometimes all the other stones.
    Sure, the Go board is larger and the possible positions are greater but then there are only three possible ``cells'' to consider: the first player's stone, the second player's stone and an empty cell. That should be easier to manage than the job we are asking computer's nowadays to do: recognize people from their faces. I believe computers can match fingerprints easily today. Go should be a walk in the park.
    Um ... this is a sad series of non-sequiturs. Computers are stunningly bad at facial recognition, even in best-case scenarios. Humans, on the other hand, can recognize someone they haven't seen for 20 years based on a casual glance. Being social animals, there's literally nothing humans do better than pattern recognition, and go is all about pattern recognition.

    I think I realize what you're trying to say, though - that there are only three states for one position on a go board, while there are many more for a chess board. This is immaterial to the game. The problem computer programmers have with go is that there's no algorithm that will reliably determine if a group of stones is alive or dead without brute-forcing the entire game. Many groups can be correctly evaluated, and computers are good at scoring finished games, but computers will happily slog ahead (and lose horribly) in games that professionals would resign in disgust.

    Read a few of these pages and then reconsider your viewpoint: Note that I'm not saying go is better than chess. I think such arguments are foolish. But, to quote myself, from a computer's perspective go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
  11. Re:Chess, how boring... by legLess · · Score: 5, Insightful · on Kramnik and Deep Fritz Draw, Tied Before Final Game
    Arguing about whether go or chess is better is bloody stupid. By any reasonable measure, go and chess are two of the best games that humans have invented. Different people like different games, and these two are no exception. I prefer go, so keep that bias in mind, but I started playing chess at 5 and still play.

    Blockquothe the poster:
    Who wins at 9Dan perfect play with Go?
    No one's yet found perfect play in go. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but it's a staggering challenge given that there are still many openings (called fuseki on a larger scale, and joseki for primarily corner plays) that haven't been fully explored. The most comprehensive book of joseki available lists over 60,000. Joseki are roughly equivalent in complexity and importance to opening libraries in chess.
    Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth? Hell no.
    I see what you mean by "two-dimensional" (compared with chess, where different pieces have different weights due to their abilities), but I think you're wrong. In go, position is much more important than in chess, but so is relation to other stones. The associations between chess pieces are more linear (physically and metaphorically) than those between go stones. A stone is strong in relation to other stones near it, and those stones in turn, and to enemy stones. It's fantastically difficult to determine what a stone is "worth," but relatively easy for masters of the game to determine the strength or life of a shape or position.

    Go is two-dimensional in the same way as a large, perfect expanse of grass - like a 500-year-old British lawn. From a distance it all looks the same, but once you get close enough you see that the variation is infinite.
    I've never met one decent Go player who could come close to beating me at chess (I'm well under a Master) -- if chess is so easy, why can't you beat me?
    I hope that after you hit "post" on this you realized how ignorant that sounds. Are you saying that go masters and chess masters should be able to play competitively against each other? That there's one omni "board-playing" skill that transfers easily between games? That's like a poker player dissing a bridge player for not beating him, or a 100-yard sprinter ragging on a marathoner - pointless.

    Some people are more blind about their game loyalties, and make silly comparisons. No reasonable person would say that chess is "easy." Chess is as easy as your opponent, just like go. From a game theory and programming perspective, however, chess is much easier than go. The world champion is in a serious match with a computer. Many people don't think that will happen for go this century.
    If it's so boring, why are their over 10^80 possible moves to be made?
    Number of moves has precious little to do with how interesting a game is. If you're whipping out your move numbers, though, check this: AI-Depot says:
    The search space for Go's game tree is both wider and deeper than that of chess. It has been estimated to be as big as ~10^170 compared to ~10^50 for chess, making the normal brute-force game tree search algorithms much less effective.
    That's a great page to read, by the way. You're free to prefer any game you want, and I agree that there are snobs on both sides. But there's no question that, for computers, go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.