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Automated Chess Battling

Posted by Hemos on from the pretty-cool-idea dept.

Matt Watson writes "Here is a link over to a story on wired that talks about the upcoming chess match in Spain between the world's top 4 computer chess programs. The winner will go on to play Vladimir Kramnik for the second round of human vs computer chess. I think that "deep fritz" sounds the coolest and my money is on that one. Read the article from Wired"

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give the AC a cigar by Scarblac · · Score: 4
    Such perfect move databases already exist. They started with all the positions with only the kings, they are all draws. Then they produce all the positions with an extra piece that convert to two kings (king takes) or that lead to an end position (for instance K and R mating a K). Since all positions are in the DB, you can deduce the perfect best moves. Some simple positions that look like a draw turn out to be mate in 224, that sort of thing.

    The best databases for this do all positions with 5 pieces (so two kings plus three other pieces), and that takes up 4 cdroms.

    Doing the six piece version is much, much bigger. For every position in the 5 piece databases, there must be about 55 legal ways to add another piece, and there are ten different pieces that can be added. So about 4x550=2200 CDs for the six piece positions (on that order, anyway, this is a very imprecise guess).

    The initial position has 32 pieces. Fit on a DVD? Hahahaaaa... The size of the universe is a limit on storage.

    --
    I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
  2. Re:Genetic Algorithm... by zaius · · Score: 4
    Yes, you are oversimplifying it.

    An AI that 'won' in a natural selection process agains other AI's is going to be adapted to playing other AI's, not humans. Much as land animals tend to fare poorly when put into marine environments, and vice versa; AI chess players won't do to well agains human opponents.

    Also, there's an incredibly massive state space for chess... the first player has 10 options (8 pawns+2 knights) on his first move, so in the first pair of moves there's already 100 possible states... strategy and/or complete tree-traversals is nearly impossible (unless you encode the entire tree of possible moves beforehand, then search it... but I don't think we have that much storage capacity available yet...).