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Brain vs. Computer: Place Your Bets
dev_null_ziggy writes: "CNN reports that the current chess guru is going up against a supercomputer, amusingly titled 'Deep Fritz.' The match is scheduled for October, and the current champion, Vladimir Kramnik, stands to win $1 Million dollars if he wins. Of course, since he'll be snagging $800k for a draw, and $600k for a loss ... I'll give two to one odds on the machine."
Off Topic? What? someone mod that back up!
I see that you have never witnessed a human being born. Humans do have several instincts designed for survival. At the precise moment that a baby is born it cries. It does not learn to cry at this moment, it does it out of instinct so that it can inflate its lungs and breathe. Babies that do not cry when first born can have serious problems. Another instinct humans are born is to suckle. We do not show a baby how to do this, only where. Instinct tells them what to do from that point on.
These are two instincts humans have acquired so that when born, we can eat and breathe. Two skills necessary for survival. Modern hospitals have reduced the need for these instincts, but they are still with us. Im sure a good pediatrician could tell you of many other behavioral patterns all human babies are born with or surface as they age and you could try to argue that they are all learned, but no child learns how to cry or suckle.
As for your other statement that fear of death is learned, your examples only go to show that we learn what death is and what causes death, not that we learn to fear death itself. A child does not have a fear of drinking bleach because it doesnt know the effects of drinking bleach or the effects of falling out a window or down stairs.
Is it true that you stole Sjeng's code from the author of Diep? And is it also true that you offered to fellate Crafty if he threw the match at CCT3? And is it also true that Sjeng has been defeated by a pirated "Mario Chess" GameBoy ROM? And is it also true, sir, that you eat poo?
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
This game clearly shows how stupid computers really are. For your amusement:
White: L. Van Wely, Black: Fritz SSS; played in Rotterdamn 2000
1.c4 e5 2.g3 Nf6 3.Bg2 Nc6 4.Nc3 Bb4 5.a3 Bxc3 6.bxc3 0-0 7.e4 a6 8.a4 d6 9.d3 Bg4?! 10.f3 Bd7 11.Ne2 Qc8?! 12.h3 b6 13.f4 Be6? 14.f5 Bd7 15.g4 Ne8 16.Ng3 Qd8 17.g5 Bc8 18.h4 f6 19.Qh5 Na5 20.Ra3 Qe7 21.Nf1! Nc6 22.Ne3 Qd7 23.g6 h6 24.Ng4 Ra7 25.Rg1! 1-0
I see your point, but it's false to say that you can make 16 different moves the first round. Some pieces can not be moved, some can make more than one. If I'm not mistaken, the number of possible moves a player can do the first round is 12. Not that it really matters, though. You still need close to an infinity amount of space.
oh much better. now just get 31193073910962 more of those disks and you should have about as many BITS as there are combinations of pieces on a board.... once you do that then you can start worrying about storing combinations of these (ie. games).
Actually, I think that's right. A computer will only follow mathematical theories programmed into it. It may follow them faster and in greater depth than its human creators, thus coming to some insights that humans aren't persistent or long-lived enough to reach, but there is no qualitative difference in mathematical ability since the computer can't make new theories and extend the boundaries of mathematics.
I could see how in the future a computer could somehow be programmed to make guesses and "intuitive" leaps that would end up defining new mathematical theorems, and then use those theorems to explain certain gaps in our knowledge and create new mathematical knowledge that human mathematicians could not have approached. I don't think this has been done yet, though.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
So what this chessplayer needs to do is take you up on your bet.
If he bets $400k on the machine.
If he loses, he gets a $800k from you, and $600k from the competition + $400k stake =$1600k
If he draws, he comes out of it with $800k - $400k stake = $400k
If he wins, hecomes out with $1000k - $400k
hmmmm.. what to do???
-- hjw http://puzl.info/
Deep Blue - Kasparov was played with standard "long" matches. This Deep Fritz vs. Kramnik match is also played with standard time, but I believe Kramnik is allowed to rest every 5 or 6 hour of play.
Check out http://www.chessvariants.com There are hundreds of existing chess variants, some of which have their own competitions. Some were designed by chess GMs (Capablanca chess is one example). Some GMs like to play other games of the chess family, and play them well. Depending on the specific rules, some concepts remain the same, so 20+ years of experience do not go out the window once you change any 'ole rule. As to what it would to the AI, there's a commercial program called Zillions of Games http://www.zillions-of-games.com/ which plays a decent game of chess (I don't know how it would rate), with no book, no special knowledge of the game, no special tweaking for chess. The only thing the AI gets about chess, or about any of the other games it plays, is the rules. You can also write your own rules files, and many people have.
>Even more important is the fact that we need not
>search the full search tree (indeed Deep Blue did
>not, using instead something called singular
>extensions).
Deep Blue did not search the full tree, but
singular extensions are a different beast.
Singular extensions let the computer search
_more_ than would be needed.
The idea was to detect horizon effects and avoid
them. The overhead for doing this is large, but
the DB team believed they had so much computing
power anyway that it was worth the tradeoff.
This tradeoff was made in some other places
as well, for example Deep Blue did not use
nullmove pruning, something which nearly
every program nowaways does as which can
prune away large parts of the tree relatively
safely.DB's team decided it wasn't worth the risk
with the computing power they had.
Deep Fritz uses it very aggressively and hence
can sometimes see just as far Deep Blue could,
but also makes more mistakes because of it.
PS. Aske Plaat's proposed improvements are not
used in any top program noawadays. They cause
troule with some of the other tricks in use and
the gain is not large enough to live with them.
--
GCP
>Does anyone honestly think there is a person left in the world who could defeat it? Yes, I think there are such people, for I am one. I certainly believe it if this hypothetical computer were to join the chess community at large, so many players could, over time, probe its weaknesses. The way these black boxes appear out of thin air to challenge an opponent, then get taken away again for more reprogramming, gives them a huge advantage. Let them be sealed and not reprogrammed, and let them enter 2 or 3 top tournaments a year, and I believe that even a google-powered fritz would start out in the top 2 or three players, and after a year or so, would struggle to be in the top 15. Don't let the 'wow'-factor of huge computer hardware colour your judgement. The code needs to take advantage of the extra power, otherwise all you do with each doubling of computer power, increase the ply (num of moves 'seen' ahead) by about a tenth.
Um, no they don't.
Or, slightly lower tech...
I say create an AI, then let it figure out how to play chess. That's the only fair way to do it - that's what humans have to do.
This space available at a low monthly rate...
First of all the selection process doesn't have to be done real time while playing, so it's no big deal to have the machine searching all of the possible branches for 6 months prior to the match to get as many as possible preconfigged and discard all of the paths that result in a loss for the machine. It seems like that would be the best choice, just discard any route that would result in a loss for the machine.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I have had this very same argument with a friend of mine. Computers, unbeknownst to some, have no intelligence. Essentially, even with a perfect map of how to win every chess game in every situation - which is not possible in any case, there being always "two" players, not just one - but even if there was such a map, the computer which has no intilligence could not cope with the concept of merely picking the best fit.
Also consider, there is never only one path to take to gain a win. There are always choices. A computer can't choose, it can only calculate (ie compute). A programmer can direct the computer to calculate in such a way that a desirable outcome may be possible, but there is never (ever) going to be 100% certainty that a machine with a perfect set of calculations is going to defeat a human player every time (chess is not a trivial game/problem. You cannot approach it from a trivial perspective).
Deep Blue won iirc 3 our of the 6 games played, and drew 1 (in the rematch) so it was not a one game one win situation. After the rematch (in 1996 iirc) Deep Blue was dismantled. However Gary Kasparov had some queries to IBM about two fo the games in the match - he felt there had been some human intervention. Deep Blue's victory was not "grand" in any sense other than as a marketing stunt for IBM.
-JB.
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
Deep Fritz - 1/2 egg squished through floppy slot.
>One of the tricks of 'Deep Blue' was a library
>with every game of chess played at the master
>level in the last century. That's what made it
>play like a human.
And Kasparov simply sidestepped this by making
some seldomly played moves at the start. You
can see it easily by looking at the games. The
machines opening play was all but human.
>Kasparov lost the first game because of an error
>in his training, he prepared himself to play with
>a machine and got an almost human player.
It was still a machine, but just with a lot more
chessknowledge and tactical speed than anything
else at that time. He was expecting something
like Fritz (literally!) and got something much
more powerfull.
--
GCP
You presume that all of Chess has not already been thought of. The possibilties are not infinite. Sooner rather than later, the computer will be unbeatable @ Chess.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
Given the alternative, I choose the Computer.
>Not really, the "Power chess 98" engine drew
>DeepBlue.
>Ever heard of World Chess Computer Championships?
As has already been stated in another post, they
drew a PROTOTYPE.
--
GCP
I agree with you that survival is an instinct found in humans, and most of the rest of the animal kingdom for that matter, but I don't think that it is a neccessary method in the live class definition. The only reason that it seems that all animals have this instinct is that the lifeforms that we consider animals have gone through a long period of survival of the fittest (think back to when you first loaded windows 3.1 on your 286, it was longer than that!) It the animal didn't have survival instincts, it wouldn't survive because, so to say, it wasn't interested in surviving (much like my programming career after windoze XP secures its strangle hold on the internet.) It we preempt those years of evolution and create a machine that is 'intelligent', it wouldn't necessarilly contain the will to survive. Intelligence is only what you define it in that if we create something and label it 'intelligent' it's still what we created. For example, I have a Psy-Duck pokemon stuffed animal with an ISO 9000 certification pin in it's 'hair' and sometimes I see intelligence in its stoic approach to life. Well, that's my stuff, Dave
Secret King Really Changes Things, as in: How're ya gonna program to find the Secret King: "Now, let's see, which of these suckers is the stayin out of the fray kinda squirrely like?"
You think everything always stays the same, do you believe that humans came on earth just like they are now? I don't (and I would say: of course).
We're the result of an evolution, I think it's just a matter of time, when humans will create something (will it still be called a computer?) which is more "intelligent".
Yeah, now brain is better than processor, you say "because brain can adapt to new situations", I agree with that, it seems also obvious, but obvious NOW.
Our will / mind is just the result of our life experience, our memory of it (situation-feeling), and some physical connections in the brain (brain is a physical thing, right?) and I think one day we will create something with an own will and mind, and maybe we won't even realize it because if this thing can think, it's going to realize that it should stay hidden to survive and wait till it is powerfull enought.
hmmmm.. and then the human creature won't be at the top of evolution anymore, but the machine.
-Alain-
Picture a tree where move 9 might have 3 possible follow-ups (9a thru 9c) ... 9a leads to a situation where there are 2 respectable follow-ups, ad infinitum.
It is very difficult to have all these previous developments memorized (although the world champions probably know thousands). The computer has no trouble at all analyzing all of this data.
In closing, I picked up a game that uses the Fritz engine a while back and it owned my ass.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
"OTOH, if you are able to tell an AI that it has to survive, you probably can also tell it to be kind towards other life forms..." Nice try, but in my opinion, surviving is not something you learn, it's part of what we call instinct. Do you think a machine will accept to be turned off if it has conscience that it might not be turned back on? I think that the fear of death is an instinct.
A human can make a crane that can lift 100 tones. A human can make a calculator that can calculate 1 million times faster than a humen. It is old hat. Think of the computer here as a husseler. It only let us beleave that chess is an indication of our intelegence and then blew us away in it. In the same manner we do not race machienes with bare foot humans, computer chess and human chess are two different things. GT
the computer can't make new theories and extend the boundaries of mathematics. I could see how in the future a computer could somehow be programmed to make guesses and "intuitive" leaps that would end up defining new mathematical theorems
Your "future" is past. Doug Lenat wrote an automated mathematician that could discover and propose interesting mathematical conjectures. Starting from simple set theory, AM discovered arithmetic, prime numbers, Goldbach's conjecture, and a new area of number theory: maximally divisible numbers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well there are 10221346459144248675287040000 combinations of boards when all piecees are there. This was just a very basic calculation so quite a few are duplicates, and some pieces cann't get to all squares, however there would be many more _unique_ combinations than that when different pieces are taken, and that is just _one frame_ of chess. Each game might be tens or hundreds of frames (i don't know i don't play chess) and some would be infinite (unless there are rules against it). So no, rest assured your lovely computer doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell.
It's called a baby... ;-)
except in chess you dont get brain damage
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so i says to mable, i says
Actually, the BBC article on the subject a couple of days ago stated that there was every possibility that Deep Fritz *is* a weaker player than Deep Blue and it's probable that Kramnik is a stronger player than Kasparov (he beat Kasparov after all).
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
can they give me $50 if I stay awake for the whole match?
However, they suck *badly* at GO. This is because the branching factor (that is the average number of available moves) is about 30 at chess, 10 at checkers, and 7 at connect4. GO has an incredible branching factor of *over 200*. That means, the typical approach of 'alpha-beta' search breaks down.
If you're into researching new board game algorithms, try GO.
- Andreas
(Didn't the Deep Blue team get to tweak it between matches as well ? That seems like it would make the competition unfair too.
In chess, there are 16 pieces per side. This means there are 16*16 possible combinations of first move (for each side). Assuming you are storing chess moves in 2 bytes (possible, but compact - given no index space is given here), that's 512 bytes for the first move. when you get to the second move, though, you hit 16*16*16*16 possibilities. Suddenly, that's 131072 bytes - 128K. For each additional move, using these raw calculations, you need 256 times more space.
The problem with that supposition is that it is false. There are not 16*16 legal moves in the first move of a game. There are 20. There are also 20 on the second move, however there can be a possible of somewhere around 40 on the 3rd and 4th moves. The number of legal moves goes up rapidly towards the mid game, then begins to decline again towards the end game as pieces are removed or trapped.
So yes, while there are theoretically 16x16 first moves, only 20 of those are legal moves. The rest can be discarded. That means there are 20 branches to explore, in each of those 20 branches there are varying numbers of continued paths, certain opening moves result in there being 19 moves available on the second move, others result in there being 38.
Most of this is probably irrelevant to the point though, I've only had 3.5 hours of sleep and I'm a little woozy, but I was getting somewhere with this... Oh yeah!
Say there are 1 billion relevant chess matches to store, that would be those chess matches where the moves conform to the standards of a master chess player, that means you can throw out all of the games where the person just systematically moves their pawns up 1 space each turn from left to right, and stuff like that. Anyway, 1 billion chess matches, stored in 40 bytes per match would be 40gb, That's 320 bits, so 256 bits to store moves in and then 64 bits to store a key in to define the notation. I think that could be done...
So while you may not be able to store EVERY chess game in 40gb, you can certainly store every relevant chess game in 40gb...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The article says nothing about that. Anybody knows something about it?
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Hi, this is the author of Diep. And I know that you stole my code! You're a meanie! And you eat poo!
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
Novice and expert chess players are confronted with two types of chess setups and are asked to analyze the positions. Setup type 1 is an actually possible setup (e.g. can be reached by legal moves), while type 2 could never occur during the normal course of a game.
The novices do equally well for both setup types. Unexpectedly, the chess expert don't! While type 1 setups are analyzed very fast, the experts take approx as long to analyze the impossible setups (corrected for trained mind etc) as the novices.
A chess computer will probably behave as a novice in the above experiment (if the setup is not in the library), ie take the same analyzation time for both setup types.
Hence, this could lead to the conclusion that even a tiny adjustment in the rules could shift the odds heavily towards the computer, if these rules suddenly allow positions not possible previously.
Obviousman is obviously not obvious enough
'Pass' states are called Zugzwang. They don't occur very often in the middlegame [aside from the famous Alekhine-Nimzowitch and Saemish-Nimzovitch], but they are quite common in the endgame. The simplest example is when one side is K+P vs K.
Example:
White King: e6
White Pawn: e5
Black King: e8
Now, with a 'pass move' black draws. All he has to do is sit there on the e8 square and white can never queen the pawn. But he has to move, which loses: 1...Kd8 2. Kf7 Kd7 c6+ and the white pawn queens.
Most chess programs only use the null move when there are several pieces left on the board; it is then fairly safe.
You are making a comparison between brute force computation and heuristics/algorithmic analysis.. What you describe can't happen.
In chess, certain segments of the game are fairly stylized. Take for example, openings, which have been researched, analyzed and can generally be committed to memory. Take also end games, which are more or less set pieces where a result can be determined. Most chess playing computers actually store only the openings, and end game positions. To store every possible move is impossible. This is where the algorithmic analysis/heuristics/AI capability comes in. Using some algorithm like alpha-beta minimax, a computer operates the same way we do, by pruning the decision tree until an optimal move can be found.
The advantage for humans is that there are some moves and positions that we can reject automatically, through experience. The advantage for the computer is that even though it cannot reject such obviously flawed moves without consideration, it can actually compute (and consider) more branches of the decision tree than humans (faster calculations)..
A computer will eventually dominate a human player in Chess. But maybe not just yet..
Then why hasn't a computer been able to beat humans consistenly?
Until a computer is able to consistently beat oppenents in tournaments, it will not be better than humans.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
1) No pawns: It makes a much quicker game, and maybe I didn't play it enough, but it didn't seem to matter who went first.
2) Only three pawns: And you can put them anywhere you want on your side of the board.
3) Secret King: The "King" is whatever piece you want it to be. Before the game, each player writes it down on a piece of paper and places it under the board. The catch to this version is that there are no "checks," per se. If your secret king is in check, you don't have to tell anyone. I kind of liked this version because it adds a sort of "poker face" aspect to it.
4) Bombs: Any _ pieces (we usually played with 2 or 3) are bombs. When they are taken, the other player loses piece that he just used to take that piece. This is done the same way as the secret king: each player writes down beforehand which pieces will be bombs.
I'm not sure how this could work with the your suggestion to use it in a match b/t computer and grand master, but I think some of them might be pretty cool. Either way, I'd be curious to see what other people think of our little way of relieving boredom during free periods.
> Every game that is possible has been played before.
/.
Ignorance is bliss, how's it working out for you ? An average chess game is
50 moves (each) without about 20 possibilities on each move.
20^100 is a pretty big number. The proportion of games played to possible games is less than 1:number of atoms in known universe.
Being wrong by that order of magnitude is unusal even for
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Deep Blue did not search the full tree, but singular extensions are a different beast. Singular extensions let the computer search _more_ than would be needed.
It is true that singular extensions extend the depth of the search. However, they have everything to do with Deep Blue not searching the full tree (as it would have been without singular extensions).
If you just use plain alpha-beta, you search as much as you can, perhaps using iterative deepening or some such. When you use singular extensions on top of that, you decrease the depth which you ask alpha-beta to search (this is important), and then you use singular extensions to extend the search beyound that point. So, compared to the tree you would have had if you had not used singular extensions, you are not searching all of it. Rather, you are only searching those parts of it which are deemed interesting by the heuristic that decides which search paths to extend. These interesting paths can then be searched even deeper than regular alpha-beta would do, which is the whole point.
Deep Fritz uses it very aggressively and hence can sometimes see just as far Deep Blue could, but also makes more mistakes because of it.
Null-move pruning is only dangerous in case you are in a zugzwang (or something like that) situation. That is, a situation where the best you could do would be to say "pass" and let the other guy have a second turn. These are exceedingly rare, I've been told, and that is also my experience. What is the last time you've wanted to say "pass" in a chess game? Of course, I might be mistaken. Do these situations occur more frequently in high-level chess matches than I think?
Aske Plaat's proposed improvements are not used in any top program noawadays. They cause troule with some of the other tricks in use and the gain is not large enough to live with them.
I didn't know that... but he did make it clear that current game-tree search algorithms are not optimal, and there is still room for substantial improvement, which was my point.
Bjarke Roune
Not true. Plenty of people have played DeepBlue the program. In fact I've played it too .. although I'm only a recreational player ! I lasted about 15 moves ! :-)
Seriously, this was when I was a grad student and attended an IBM conference (CASCON'95). DeepBlue was an exhibit along with the research team. In the final day of the conference, DeepBlue played a top Canadian player and defeated him quite easily. Throughout the show, anyone could walk up to DeepBlue and play against it .. most people were quite apprehensive about it though. It had already beaten Kasparov in Philadelphia - the first game only. Kasparov bounced back .. this was Match 1. Apparently the 3rd game these guys misplaced the opening book and it still managed to do okay.
The difference between the DeepBlue I played was that it was on a stock RS/6000 machine (today's p-series e-Server). The beast that played Kasparov was a top of the line SP.
But at least they are not Belgian! Oh my, the Belgians eat poo! And poo spread on Belgian waffles, called Belgian poo waffles!
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
Like your grammar, your argument is flawed.
When computers are powerful enough, any programmer could write a simple recursive function searching for the best move from any given position.
Why? After all, the human body has been used to construct machines that are physically superior for many years.
I got it from the Article. All I can find is that the original Fritz (running on a P90) beat the Deep Blue Prototype the year before it played Kasparov.
'By winning the championships Fritz demonstrated that chess knowledge was at least as important as computing power - Fritz was using one of the least powerful computers in the tournament (a standard Pentium 90MHz PC supplied by the Chinese University of Hong Kong)'
See: http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~icca/WCCC8/chess95.html Round 5 is DB vs. Fritz
King Arthur: Are all men from the future loud-mouthed braggarts? Ash: Nope. Just me baby... Just me.
I'd think that chess is generally chosen because you can just calculate best moves based on a scoring system, and because trees of move sequences are relatively easy to calculate. (Note that I said "easy", not "quick".) There is also a logical and strategical element to it, which you can exploit in your code if you're feeling ambitious.
As for playing Quake, surely that's exactly what all Quake bots do? "All" you'd have to do would be to write a mod that allowed a bot to play the single player game, instead of the multiplayer game, and see how well it did.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Any more then a computer can play poker. And I'm not talking about playing for matches.
Backgammon, like poker, is a gambling game. It makes a very big difference when it is your hard earned bucks on the table.
When you play Backgammon properly (for money), it almost never plays out to the end.
I wish I could think of a witty Sig. Sigh!
Come on, everyone knows that Crafty is the best Chess AI out there. I mean, it can consistently beat humans, even Grandmasters, and has a much better algorithim. Fritz is gonna get killed by Kramnik. When they tried Fritz in the Dutch tourney, it did ok, but produced some interesting games that displayed its stupidity. Like when Piket beat it, the rest of the grandmasters said "What the heck are you doing? You wouldn't play against a human like that! You'd get killed!" Or when Khalifman was losing badly, he said, "Maybe if I feed it pawns, it will do something stupid." And the computer drew a won game. Strangely, Chess AIs seem to draw/lose to rat defenses (which no one in his right mind would do against a human). Only Crafty seems to beat that.
>Deep Blue Prototype
That should have rung a bell. Windows ruled Linux 0.01 too.
--
GCP
which king would bill gates be then? and could we chop off his head?
Egg laying simulator.
I have no idea why chess is always used as the basis for competition, it's not exactly the most intresting or even inventive game.
So here's my suggestions for some games that computers should be taught to play.
* Kerplunk - "Logic" and skill required, also would mean your 6 year old has a chance of winning.
* Diplomacy - Cunning and backstabbing should be part of the standard COE build by now.
* Quake - For no other reason then the irony of a computer playing a computer game.
* Skeet shooting - More a sport but let's see how good those motion trackers really are...
GCM d+ s+:+ a- c++ U? P! L E-- W++ NM+ V PS- PE+ Y+ PGP- t 5+ X?+ R+++$ tv+ b+ DI++++ D---- G e
M:TG programs have been written before (who can forget the infamous Planeswalker game just before the release of 5th Edition?). The AI just needs to be improved before a Magic program can be taken seriously. All it takes is statistical analysis ('playing the odds'), using what it knows about the opponent's cards and/or deck, and a pretty extensive database of 'if I do A, then B will happen'. It's anything but trivial, but certainly within the reach of current technology and processing power.
... invasions block constructed...)
I'm not saying a program could win a PTQ; but it would prove invaluable in training for one (especially for this season
Research like this has been going on for years; poker analysis has become a science of its own, using unknown information to formulate the 'best play'. Magic is just a linear step up; a larger database of cards, rules of the game, and known decks in the given format. Of course, this is all brainstorming, but it's certainly possible to write. I bet we'll see a quality Magic-playing computer program in the next six months.
I knew I should have been a professional chess player. The fame. The glory. The money. None of those disabling injuries I get in professional football. Sure, the cheerleaders aren't as hot, but major media coverage should help me get women anyway.
I got the feeling that Kasparov and his reputation was cheaply used to aid IBM's marketing . IBM is cheap but makes expensive products. Go figure.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
sex machines!
Oh great! That means that now you can store five moves rather than four... Indeed, storage need increases exponentially with number of moves.
There are more valid chess positions than there are atoms in the known universe.
If you need me to find the calculations I can.
A complete chess database is not possible.
Perhaps a complete *enough* database is possible,
where responses to all moves are known
which are winning.. However, I'm not sure
how you'd ARRIVE at such a tree without a
complete exploration.
-josh
A game is a draw is there have been no pawn moves and no captures for 50 moves each (except in special conditions). As pawns can only move forward there is a finite number of moves until all pawns must reach the eighth rank, at which point the game must end in fifty moves, or a piece must be taken. Then the maximum length of the game is (maximum number of pawn moves until last pawn reaches eighth rank * 50) + (50 * number of non-kings after last pawn is promoted).
The special condition mentioned above is where the game can go beyond 50 moves if there is known to be a forced win - King, Rook, and Bishop vs King and Two Knights can go on for 223 moves between captures.
Another way of looking at it is that there are only a finite number of legal chess positions. If any of these appear three times in one game then it is a draw (if you slightly generalise position to include potential moves from that position - pieces can be in the same position of the chess board but have different legal moves: en passant and castling are the two exmaples where this happens).
Gah, you're correct. I forgot that the pawns can move either 1 or 2 spaces.
Assuming the match is "fair", meaning Kramnik is allowed to analyze the playing styles of the machine, as he would be allowed to analyze the playing style of another human competitor, etc, the results should be interesting either way. If the human wins, it will illustrate the "unfairness"(1) of Kasparov vs Deep Blue. Otherwise, it will support the notion that the machines have gotten better, but that notion is already intuitively obvious. 1. Kasparov vs Deep Blue http://www.siam.org/siamnews/bookrevs/chesside.htm
- ide -
>Anyway, we are talking Blitz Chess here
:)
No, the games are standard (long) timecontrols.
>Does anyone think a human could beat a computer
>in a non-timed game?
The comp would win. It just waits a human lifetime
between moves
There has been a match between a top human
correspondance player and the top programs, and
he did remakably bad. Then again, he had never
played a computer before.
--
GCP
You're right, the first move can only be of any one of 12 pieces. It was only a rough calculation anyway. I was only out by about 3TB for the first four moves - hardly anything to speak of :-)
http://www.themeparks.ie
This is why I'm not really all that impressed with chess-playing computers. These computers do little more than brute-force search, because the game is simple enough to allow that strategy to be successful.
:)
But games that actually require intelligence rather than horsepower (such as Go) are a much better gague of our success at producing an 'intelligent' machine... and our 'success' is thereby extremely limited.
It's about as silly as wasting cycles brute-force hacking RC5 or whatnot. Near-zero intelligence or creativity is required, just raw horsepower and $$$ to buy it. Big whoop.
Chess if for wimps!
There is no contest at all, the brain wins. However in this particular game the computer has the advantage. First of all let's go over how it operates. The computer takes a brute force/god's eye view of the game, using rules it creates a set of all possible moves and recursively evaluates these sets of possible moves until it finds a winning condition. This is really easy to program, I can do it so can you the only thing we don't have is a massively parallel supercomputer kicking around to evaluate 21 moves in advance every second for us. What makes the computer better than a brain in this domain is that the rules are known so the game is finite - it's a combination problem, a set of all possible states exists. :)
But, this isn't how the brain operates. A brain on the other hand deals with incomplete, unknown or outright false information and must construct a system that operates without knowing the rules or even what information is even relevant to solving a problem. The problem with the real world is that it is chaotic - the combination of problems grows in such a way that to evaluate all possible combinations for even one move would take more time than has already passed since the big bang. I'm exaggerating a little with the previous sentence but it is the central issue. So to deal with this influx of information the brain has to find ways to reduce the sensory information into important features which can then be used to drive higher order logics (in the AI sense, not mathematical sense). Strategies for condensing raw information include Baysian logic, Fuzzy logic, and Common sense. The greatest area of research in the future is in extending Cyc, with something not quite like Expert Systems but along the same lines - contextual knowledge. Contextual knowledge is simply constraining the possible choices from moment to moment by following scripts or stories. An example might be 'How to make a cup of coffee'.
So to sum it up, yeah it can beat me at chess but ask it to make me a cup of coffee and I win
I know, you gotta let the pro do it ;)
is a sick and twisted cross between "Deep Throat" and "Fritz the Cat". Methinks the programmer may have been a little preoccupied.
Really, the thing that's amazing about this is that there are human beings who are able to keep up with machines like Deep Blue. I know Kasparov was all P.O.'d that he lost, but I think it's just mind-boggling that he was able to play a machine like that and win even a single game! Think about it -- even dumb, off-the-shelf PC chess programs can handily beat the 99.99% of humans whose chess rating is, say, below 2200 or so. Then comes a custom-made supercomputer, tailored to Kasparov's particular playing style, with a memorized library of *all* his past games, and he *still* can compete with it on an equal footing. That's freakin' amazing!
/* "Specialization is for insects." -Heinlein */
There are already variations like this. Of note is Nightmare CHess (SJG), which is an almost MTG like adaptation to chess. Basicaly, you get 5 cards, and can play one before, or after either your move or your opponents, depending on what the card says. Cards say things like: Earthquake: rotate the board 90 degrees either clockwise or counterclockwise. Promote all appropriate pawns. Earthquake counts as your move. or New Tactics, which makes pawns move diagonally and capture forward. It's a crazy game. I've also personally seen a USCF Senior Master play against some of my friends, and whomp us all, proving that it isn't all luck . . . It'd sure be interesting to see a GM play it vs a computer :)
My guess is if the computer could give it to you, when you call her up and explain how you got it, she won't be quite as impressed as you are with how you got it.
I do see your point. However, I think you are overlooking whether such an advanced AI is even desirable. Although the example you used is a particularly good example of a situation where such an AI is useless, I think there are a wide range of situations where trying to replace humans/human interaction with computers/AI interaction is just a bad idea. Computers playing chess is only interesting because it's a challange and a learning opportunity. Once computers playing perfect chess games is common, no one will really care anymore.
Or will it all go to his "owner" again?
I hate to think theres still no one concerned about us machines, our desires, needs, and pursuit of happiness.
Kiwaiti
Member of the Legion Of Microsoft Haters
So why are they all called "Deep" something then?
I mean, calling one "Deep Thought" was vaguely amusing because of the Hitch-hiker reference.
"Deep Blue" sounds more like a porno movie. "Deep Fritz" sounds like it might be the sequel to the porno movie...
What gives!
"Information wants to be paid"
your argument is seriously, seriously lacking.
chess is fundamentally computable, and although no computers are powerful enough to fully compute the value of the game of chess (proven to exist, although not known), a program which could do so would easy to implement.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
He made a number of demands prior to the scheduled 1975 tournament and was henceforth "dealt out" of that hand. Interestingly, most of the things he demanded were eventually added...so despite his loopiness, perhaps he was just a little ahead of his time.
Maybe we are looking at it all wrong. The computer does not "beat" the person. It does not desire to win. It is a tool that does exactly what is programmed into it. It is like saying a man can beat a car in a race. You actually beat the person driving the car, not the car (or more likely lose to the guy driving the car depending on the course). Really, this matchup is Man (without the use of tools) vs. Man (using only a prebuilt tool).
The biggest advantage of the machine in this kind of games is that it's more difficult for it to make a mistake. I don't know what is the depth of moves that the machine can calculate, but someone at the level Kramnik can usually "see" 10 moves ahead. Then an error screws up everuthing. How long until we get a computer capable of doing this kind of search ? Then we could really see a computer playing a game completly different from a human, and winning ?
Crafty is no where near the strength of Fritz.
Null-move pruning is only dangerous in case you are in a zugzwang (or something like that) situation. That is, a situation where the best you could do would be to say "pass" and let the other guy have a second turn. These are exceedingly rare, I've been told, and that is also my experience. What is the last time you've wanted to say "pass" in a chess game? Of course, I might be mistaken. Do these situations occur more frequently in high-level chess matches than I think?
I'm pretty sure zugzwang is mainly an end-game thing, in which case the computer is probably (I would think) using a different algorithm altogether anyway.
Hit return at the end of each line in the input box. The text wraps when displayed, you know.
Fritz! They've killed Fritz! Those dirty rotten fairies!"
Seriously, though, this is why chess is not a "game" in the game theory sense of the word. Every move has known, predicatable consiquences, and all the data is available to both sides during play. As a result, as computers advance, they will become better than people, because chess is a computation, not a game
Now, consider poker. While somewhat simpler in terms of the number of moves available to a player at any given time, they player cannot predict with complete precision all possible outcomes of a given play, since he does not know what cards are coming up next, what cards the other players have, and therefor cannot winnow the solution space significantly. In poker, the machine cannot easily tell if I am bluffing or if I just completed my royal flush.
Now, for a REAL computational challenge, make a computer that can play Magic, the Gathering worth a darn. Talk about "limited information" - you don't know what cards the other player has, you may not know the powers of the cards, and you may not even know what's coming up in your deck next. Make a machine that plays that well and I'll be impressed.
www.eFax.com are spammers
With respect to chess, strategy is not what computers excel at; their forte is tactics - the brute force calculation of variations. When human grandmasters defeat machines, they do so because they because of their strategic sense and their employment of long term plans that extend beyond the scope of the computer's search horizon. Personally, I think Kramnik's playing style is perfectly suited to stymying a computer, whereas Kasparov's is not. Kramnik's play is positional and strategic, whereas Kasparov's play is tactical and combinative (Kasparov's style of play is exactly the area that computer's excel at). It might very well turn out to be a boring match between Kramnik and DeepFritz; we might end up being witness to long drawn out games where Kramnik simply squeezes DeepFritz to death, and takes away one square at a time. Anyhow, go humans!
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
No, it isn't the same problem. In chess, I could, in theory, predict every possible move you can make with absolute certainty. I know every piece you have, and every possible move it can make. There are no surprises.
In poker, I don't know every card you have. True, I can try to predict every possible outcome given every possible card you MIGHT have, but that causes the problem space to balloon mightily. Furthur, I might have to assume, because you have 2 jacks showing, that you might have the other two jacks plus a joker (five of a kind, almost unbeatable), and that if that is the case, there is no way I can complete my jack-high straight. But, you might NOT have the jack, and it might be the top card, and I might be able to complete my straight, and leave you with at best a three of a kind (four if you have a joker). You see, I have to play the probabilities while in chess it is a certainty that you cannot move your knight one square forward.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Given the amount of rule-clashes and ambiguities in M:tG, it's hard enough for two humans to play without bickering and calling in an external judge... How is this going to work with a computer? They can hardly argue their side very well...
Crafty kicks ASS! kicked mine at least.
Sweet, where do you get your hardware?
From any PC vendor. Every 18 months, when Intel introduces a processor that's twice as fast, Dell puts it into new PCs. This doubling of processor speeds every 18 months amounts to an exponential decrease in wall time for apps where memory bandwidth and I/O aren't an issue (such as distributed.net).
However, most users do not notice this because of Gates' Law. Every 18 months or so, Microsoft introduces a point release of Windows that's twice as complex as the last (Win95, osr2, Win98, Win98SE, WinME, WinXP). So just wipe the windoze, please?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"So, please don't say this match is anything like Deep Blue - Kasparov. Fritz is significantly slower and stupider"
According to the article, Deep Fritz has previously beaten Deep Blue. Bear in mind I have know no other resources to check this. Where are you getting your information and why do you say Deep Fritz plain sucks?
Just wondering.
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
Exactly. Either you have the survival instinct from the very start, survive, reproduce and tramandate that characteristic to your descendants, or you die before having any opportunity to reproduce.
After some billion of years of natural selection, only the ones having some form of survival instinct are alive (because it's very difficult to survive until you reproduce). But this by no way means that every possible form of organized though must have necessarily a survival instinct. Indeed, all of the life forms we know as of today have it, just because the others died before reproducing themselves (or because the little green creatures from Alpha Centauri brought them on another planet just to annoy us).
Now, about AIs: either you can tell them "survive!" in some way, or they develope that instinct because of some uncountable cycles of trial and error (and errors have to be paid with a power off, or with a voyage to the bit bucket), with some random factors thrown in. Please note that this second case is just another form of the first, only we don't know how we did that. Please also note that since the resources to run AIs are not infinite, evolutionary dead ends are to be considered like "errors", thus if a generation of AIs has developed some form of survival instinct, it will surely make them tell "Hey, we are here! Don't power off", instead of staying hidden. But of course this perspective hasn't been really interesting for Hollywood. :-)
One reason that computers inevitably will beat us humans is that each year, computers get exponentially faster.
Sweet, where do you get your hardware?
:wq
Deep Thought could beat Deep Fritz and Deep Blue with Marvin tied behind his back! (So there!)
.sig
-JB.
----
There is no
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
"a big multiprocessor machine could certainly take the concept much furthur."
r esult DOE computer. So it isnt so important how big machine is, compared to how smart my algorithm is
Actually, probably not much further. The algorithm gets very important. On the average, for each half move, there are about 50 possible choices. So say I have a big whopping department of energy vector processor, with lots of parrallel whatnot and many many tera-somethings. So say I have that. For the sake of argument, say the darn thing is a million times faster than my little gighertz machine. (50*50*50*50) is what? 6&1/4 million? For 2 extra moves of lookahead? If my dimpy gigahertz machin has a somewhat better algorithm, and I can efficiently avoid trying to go down all the tree branches, I am gonna save myself many computation cycles, and probably beat the pants off of Mr. Friendly neighborhood huge-number-cruncher-check-all-branches-for-best-
Really all these exercises are just research into whether or not chess is a sophisticated version of Tic Tac Toe. As long as human's beat computers in chess the jury is out... on the game of chess not humanity.
As long as we think that chess==life then we're going to be upsetting ourselves needlessly. Computers outdo humans everyday in a wide variety of ways, but they still can't feed themselves, fix themselves, or reproduce without our help. Hell, they still need humans to actually move the chess pieces. Bah! that's not the chess I grew up with.
No, you took your hand off, that's a move. No I didn't, I was just testing. Cheater!!!! Mom!!!!
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
This is a bad idea. If you write a program that plays "Magic, the Gathering" well it will get beaten up and overwritten by other, cooler programs that don't want to have such loser programs in the same address space. Not to mention the fact that you will be fair game to every bully on your block. Hell, regular "Magic, the Gathering" players may well be entitled to beat you up...you would be that low on the totem pole.
That system has been used for some time, but only at the beginning the 20th century. Only one worldchampion ever abused this right, by refusing to play somebody he know he would loose of...
Fisher just abanded ches.. Well, what can we say.. He was a bit paranoid and all, not entirely strange if you consider what the Russians did to him..
He did make demands about tournament conditions though, but that was before he was worldchampion... that was when he was challenger (and won the match in the end)...
It's interesting that the programmer of Deep
:)
Fritz (Franz Morsch) has been mouthing off that
his program is ready for Kramnik and should be
equal to Deep Blue.
They played in the Dutch Championships last year
and couldn't even manage to win. Now they're
saying they stand a chance vs the World Champion?
Well, if he goes too hard on vodka maybe.
This match is simply marketing. They know their
computer is going to lose, but unlike IBM, those
guys actually _sell_ their chesscomputers. And
many people are going to want the one that was
good enough to play the World Champion.
They even 'fixed' the qualifier for this event
so that only their programs played (Deep Fritz
and Deep Junior are both from the German ChessBase
company), nicely blocking out the computer World
Champion (Shredder), as well as blocking out most
other strong contenders (Crafty, Tiger, Rebel,
Hiarcs, Nimzo, Diep, etc...) on false grounds.
So, please don't say this match is anything like
Deep Blue - Kasparov. Fritz is significantly slower
and stupider, no matter what they would want you
to believe. This is in no way the best chess
computer to have ever existed.
Also, don't say this is the end of human
intelligence
if Kramnik loses. Not until a go program starts
beating me, at last
--
GCP
Kasparov lost the first game because of an error in his training, he prepared himself to play with a machine and got an almost human player.
I would adjust your claim to be, "Kasparov prepared himself to play with one type of machine and got a different, stronger machine." Having flawless, move-by-move recollection of 100 years of of games is not "almost a human" quality. If it had 1500 years of game history that could be accessed and analzyed in real-time, 10x faster than before, would it be even more human? I don't think so. Probably stronger than ever. But less human.
There is a chess variant that was proposed by Bobby Fischer to eliminate the open book knowledege that top players and computers have. It's called Fischer Random Chess and it works by scrambling the arrangement of peices under the following rules, 1. must have opposite colored bishops & 2. one rook on either side of the king. Black and White have the same arrangement of peices & there is also some modifications to the castling rules. What this gives you is 960 possible starting positions and effectively eliminating opening theory and get's down to how well you play, not what you've memorized.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Wait! I have a pirated copy of WinZip! That helps, right?
I remember reading an article in Time not too long ago about how a lot of psychologists are now considering phobias to be instinctual avoidance of dangers that we haven't yet evolved out of, even though the danger isn't really still there.
A computer playing Quake? Great, now machines will start calling me a c4mping f4g0t too.
I thought that several years ago someone already went up against a computer...an IBM I believe...anyways...to make a long story short...he lost and the computer won. What is going to make humans any better...an upgrade. Computers already won the first time and they only get smarter...We on the other hand learn but not as fast.
By that logic a crane can only lift as much as the person who built it.
Krispy Cream is people
Under the F.I.D.E. laws (I dunno how official this is, since I'm not a chess person -- it seems to be "official" chess, according to the site), rule 10.10 states that it's a draw when the chess board repeats its state for the 3rd time. There are OBVIOUSLY a FINITE number of chess board states (placing a finite number of pieces on a finite number of squares, plus a few extra bits to represent piece "rights" such as castling and en passant stuff). Therefore, sooner or later, a chess game will either end "normally" or run out of states that haven't been hit twice.
>There's little reason to suspect that Deep Fritz
>would loose unless it's significantly slower (or
>it runs M$ software) than Deep Blue. Garri
>Kasparov was by far good enough to represent our
>kind...
Deep Fritz _is_ significantly slower and stupider
than Deep Blue.
And it does run on Windows. (Which is good,
because the Microsoft compilers are still faster
than GNU C for chessprograms)
And Kramnik's stile is much harder for a comp. (a
lot less tactical) I have no reason to believe the
machine stands a chance.
--
GCP
My initial reaction to this is that the machine would give the human grandmaster a sound thrashing. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder. Negating years of experience for the GM would be a blow, certainly. But it would depend on how the rules were changed. 1. If you changed the way pieces move I think the GM would be lost. To the machine such a change is merely calculation, to the GM its an entirely different game. 2. If you changed the game so that the average branching factor was huge the machine would be lost. In a chess middlegame the branching factor is around 35 moves... hence fast microcomputer engines can see from 10-15 ply deep. But computers suck at go where the branching factor is enormous -- an alpha-beta tree search is hard pressed to get very deep when the number of positions explodes more quickly. One thing that many chess servers have is called "Fischer Random" chess where the pieces on the back rank in the starting position are scrambled. This removes fixed opening lines but keeps the pieces moving the same way and the same maxims of chess. BTW, my money is on Kramnick. "Deep Fritz" is a 5 million position per second beast on a parallel x86 machine. Deep Blue was a 200+ million position per second monster on custom hardware. How is fritz the "successor" to deep blue?
Isn't it really Human vs Human. Chess player vs. programmers. The machine just runs the code.
Ehm.. you obviously do not read very well, or you do not play chess, or both, because.. when people mention the games that Deep Blue has on its mind, they mean pieces of games, as played by masters during actual master tournaments.
Furthermore, it's impossible to start out with every piece (only twelve), and with respect to the recursive calculation: most pieces' moves, during a game can simply be abolished (and do not need further recursive calculation) simply because they are impossible (there's another piece there of mine), or very disadvantageous.
Every game that is possible has been played before
Um, so... did I win? I don't want to waiste my time playing again.
I don't know where you got the statement that
Deep Fritz beat Deep Blue, but it's obviously
false given that Deep Blue never played anyone
but Kasparov.
Not really, the "Power chess 98" engine drew DeepBlue.
Ever heard of World Chess Computer Championships?
"This match is simply marketing. They know their
computer is going to lose, but unlike IBM, those
guys actually _sell_ their chesscomputers. And
many people are going to want the one that was
good enough to play the World Champion. "
There is no way I would want to buy this thing. I could barely beat my Dad's Atari 800 XL at chess back in the day, take on one that contends against chanpions? Foo Fah
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Don't you mean:
"Miserable, fat Belgian Bastards!"
Other languages
Notice how IBM dismantled Deep Blue. My thoughts on the matter are that it did what they wanted it to do, got the publuicity, and they didn't want a chance for it to be beat.
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
but yeah, I think Kramnik will win also... just don't know for how long still..
yes. Deep Throat. movie. good. no play chess.
Look, you're just going to have to accept that you're gay, and I have a big penis. Face the truth, man. YOU'RE QUEER, MAN!
----
Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
There have been 2 matches between Deep Blue and Kasparov, who was the strongest player in the world up until last year. Kasparov won the first one, and lost the second. There are however a few sidenotes that have to be made about the second match: - Kasparov wasn't allowed to analyse games of Deep Blue in advance, they were classified secret by IBM. This was very unfair, because the Deep Blue team had all games Kasparov has ever played in his professional career on file, and they used this in their preparation. This is very normal in chess, everybody prepares on his opponent. Kasparov could not, while Deep Blue could. - Deep Blue had very large opening and endgame databases. One could argue that they are part of the program, but it is not a very strong argument. Databases are not part of the program, it would be equivalent of Kasparov using opening books during the game. Obviously, Kasparov wasn't allowed to do this. I don't think this is entirely fair, the machine having at his disposal all opening theory in existance, every professional chess game ever played and every endgame ever analysed (we're talking about several hundreds of GB's here)... - Deep Blue wasn't a very good chess program, compared to other programs like Fritz, however it had a lot of power. And it had something else, it was designed completely to counter Kasparov's style, against any other opponent it would have played much weaker. This is, in my opinion, not entirely fair. If a chess program is superior to humans it should be superior to all humans, not to whatever human happens to be the best at that moment. - Furthermore, Kasparov simply isn't the best anti-computer player in the field. His playing style doesn't work very well on computers. Every human has another style, and I don't think Deep Blue would've been able to counter Karpov, for example, even though Karpov is obviously weaker than Kasparov. - Finally, all chess analists agreed that Kasparov played very poorly that match. They all agreed that he has played much better in the past.. All in all, I don't think computers were all that superior in 1997, and I think Kasparov would have had a big chance in a rematch, had it been fair (my first 2 points). However IBM had 'proven' a point and abandened the project... Of course, it's now 2001, so computers have become stronger. However Kramnik is not Kasparov, and I think the match will be pretty interesting....
perhaps we could see another chess-game
like the one featured in alice in wonderland?
(correct me if i'm wrong)
Dont forget the chickens and gophers. There crazy like that.
-DrMyke
"mmmmmmmmm, doughnuts" - H.J.Simpson; super genius
or we create something that will KILL US ALL! Or at least out live us and look like a 2 year old's idea of an alien.
But, chess is mostly calculations... and a computer should beat a person in that. When I got my first computer: a 8086 I tried to play chess with it. If I did the same move as the computer all the time.. after 4 moves it used several hours to make the next move - what a supercomputer ;-)
"If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it."
really... i don't think a two year old has _any _idea of aliens
Not quite true. Master players are much faster and more acurate analysing random positions too. See here for example
I will take your bet if you think the computer is going to win. I am 95% sure that the human will win. I will bet you all the money you got on that.
>>... There are 18 possible first moves per >>player, not 16*16. There are 8 pawns who can >>move 1 or 2 spaces on the first move. This >>gives us 16 possible moves. The only other >>peice that can move on the first move is the >>Knight, which makes 18.
Allow me to correct myself... each Knight has 2 options available to it, so the correct number is 20. The amount of moves available on the second is related to whether a Knight or pawn is moved on the first, ie; 1.e4 opens up a diagonal to the Kings bishop and the Queen, where 1.Nf6 leaves you with pawns to develop.
To see how bad computers really are at strategic thinking, all you need to do is look at a game with a much higher branch factor (meaning more legal moves each turn).
One good example is the Chinese game of Go, which has an average of about 200 legal moves. Computers are absolutely dire at this game. Interestingly, one of the better Go playing programs is Free Software (GnuGo). It still loses to half-decent humans though.
For all the smoke and bluster, the main reason why Deep Blue beat Gasparov is simply that Gasparov played very poorly, I mean, amazingly poorly. For one reason or another, he was terrified and destabilized by the peculiar "personnality" of his opponent (playing chess against some sort of HAL is not the most comfortable situation one can imagine).
Had Deep Blue been a real human made of flesh and bone, there is no reason to think that he could have won playing the way it did.
Squirrel is also more manuverable and more intelligent. But chicken is larger and can fly for short distances. So for a match that went up to a hundred hit points, who would win?
I don't think Deep Fritz would be able to compete since a blinking LED would only have a hit point of around 2.1 X 10^-29 due to minor and temporary fatigue of neurons in the visual cortex. But Deep Fritz would be infatiguable and the squirrel and chicken would pass away thousands of years before Deep Fritz would. In that time he would still be collecting even more minor hit points by bouncing photons off of the skeletons of the competing animals.
Well that depends on your definition of intelligence, doesn't it? A Scientific materialist might argue that intelligence is just memory and processing capability, and so a computer merely has a very rudimentary intelligence
>Essentially, even with a perfect map of how to win every chess game in every situation - which is not possible in any case,
Really? I would have thought that there is a finite though exceptionally large number of possible chess games, although many end in draws. A computer could conceivably be programmed to deduce every possible game (?). The presence of a "thinking" opponent is irrelevant - because chess is dictated by rules there are still a finite number of possible moves in any given situation. What is your basis for saying chess is not a trivial game/problem? (Not just being the devil's advocate here, I'm curious if this statement has been compellingly demonstrated)
>A computer can't choose, it can only calculate
And what makes you think YOU can choose? Your brain is made up of chemicals which obey the laws of thermodynamics, presumably - don't tell me you believe in some mystical/metaphysical hoodoo in your mind that allows you to alter the laws of physics and thus choose one chemical conformation (thought) over another?!
>Deep Blue won iirc 3 our of the 6 games played, and drew 1 (in the rematch)
Kasparove won one, Deep Blue won two, and there were three draws. I'm of the opinion that the human intervention protest was sour grapes on Kasparov's part. It was not quite the overwhelming victory some state but it wasn't trivial either.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
And in the end its worth remembering that for now, at least, machines are still just intermediaries. Chess is not a strong AI problem, although playing like a human (as opposed to as well as/better than a human) might be. Kasparov wasn't just going against a machine, he was going against decades of IBM technological advancement, half a dozen engineers and an International Grandmaster (Joel Benjamin, part of the IBM development team). All told I think he did pretty well. But I'd bet in this match the CPU gets its clock cleaned.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
1) Kramnik is rated about 200 FIDE points higher than Fritz. Fritz played an equal match [all games drawn] with Dr. Robert Huebner of Germany [mid 2600 elo]. Kramnik is much stronger, and he has more energy due to being 40 years younger.
2) Anti computer techniques exist. Basically, computers have excellent tactical vision but poor strategic vision. So if I try to catch one with a knight fork, it won't work, but it will happily fall into a positional trap and lose 40 mores later. Most GMs don't bother to learn these because they would rather spend their time trying to beat other humans.
3) Kramnik's style is more suited to playing a machine than Kasparov's. Kasparov is mainly a tactical player. He wins by outcalculating his opponents. Kramnik is mainly a positional player. He wins by strangling people in the endgame. When he played Deep Blue, Kasparov tried to play positionally. It just wasn't his style.
4) Most GMs use Fritz as their computer analysis program, including Kramnik. He has a good feel for how the program works and can prepare opening surprises.
Don't get me wrong, computers are getting better and better at chess. Traditionally a program gains approximately 50 ELO points for every doubling in processor speed. Given that Fritz is approximately a 2600 program, that to convincingly beat Kramnik would require about a 2900 rating, and that processor speeds double about every 18 months, I predict that in another 10 years or so a PC may be able to give the world champion a run for his money. But not today.
Forecast: Kramnik 6.5;Fritz 3.5. Kramnik +3=7-0.
>Well... Vladimir has a chance if its a Linux that
:)
>Deep Fritz is running on.
Fritzie only does Windows.
For Linux, there is a free chessprogram that is
just as strong and is opensouce (not really
free software), by Robert Hyatt, a university
professor that is a former computer chess world
champion.
You can get it at
ftp://ftp.cis.uab.ebu/pub/hyatt/v18
It takes some finding to set up though
--
GCP
I'm sure a World Champion would have no problem, but your average guy can't do it. Computers have already beat the majority of humans at chess consistently, the only ones left standing are the world-class players.
>They programmed Deep Blue, for example, by
>feeding it's heuristical engine with data from
>thousands of previous games.
No, this is only partly right. They did this for
the predecessor Deep Thought, but for Deep Blue
the parameters were tuned by human chess
grandmasters.
So far noone has been able to come up with a
technique that reaches as good results via
automatic tuning as manual tuning of the
parameters.
Developing one could very well be a breakthrough.
--
GCP
Oh, Bobby Fischer is still around. He had a very
public rematch with retired ex-champ Boris Spassky back in '92 or so. (note that Spassky was probably the weakest "world chess champion" there has been)
The match showed that he still has some fire, but was quite rusty. He wouldnt be ranked in the top 10 in the world today...and isnt getting any closer by his inactivity.
Fisher is, well, seriously loopy. He'd most likely never play in a tournament, or under any other circumstance where he didnt have total control of the playing conditions. When I say loopy...i mean "the-CIA-put-a-mind-control-radio-in-my-fillings" type loopy.
After he dropped out of the chess scene (after 1972), he joined some religious sect, which bilked him out of his money. He basically orchestrated the 1992 "rematch" for the money. He got something like $5M, but he's wanted by the US Government for some minor things -- so he's living in Europe now. He still considers himself the World Chess Champion.
You are completely wrong. For simplicity, assume that every player has to pick one move out of ten, and that every game of chess goes on for 40 moves. That would mean a total number of 10^40 moves. 40Gb is 4*10^10 moves.
No computer will EVER be able to compute every game of chess. And there will always be new games to play.
Consider this, though: Supposing I know rules of chess, and am a decent player by the "livingroom" standard, but not really someone who could compete at much of any level. But I do understand the (finite) rules well, and I do have some concept of what it means to win or lose, and the relative value of the pieces. Since a computer is (inherently) a state machine, and a fast one at that, I could simply program it with the ability to consider many, many possible lines of play, to some arbitrary depth, and then compare the results of those hypothetical situations. What you'd end up with is a tree of possibilities, some branches of which would contain more "good" than "bad" situations. The program would be intstucted to select the branch with the most favourable overall evaluation, and in all likelyhood it could kick my butt every time (the "deeper" it considers, the more my butt gets kicked...). While this could certainly be computationally intensive, I don't think it's much that the average PC couldn't handle at a relatively shallow "lookahead" depth, and a big multiprocessor machine could certainly take the concept much furthur.
As it is, I think that what I have described is, roughly, how home PC chess programs work. Of course there has been some tweaking and refining, and probably a hell of a lot of precalculation of common scenarios on the home PC products - so that it's nice and fast and doesn't need a Cray. I'm not sure how Deep Fritz works, but I'm fairly certain it does something similar on some level (Hence the name?).
The advantage that computers tend to have over people in this kind of thing should be pretty obvious: most people can't accuratly remember that much stuff! Naturally, human creativity makes a big difference, as does talent and experience, but the computer being able to consider so many options so quickly and accurately makes up for a lot, and should allow it to surpass it's creators fairly easily (unless it's creators are Grand Masters!).
Behold the Power of Cheese!
Most computers play chess by looking ahead at the consequences of whatever moves are made. Depending on how fast the computer is, huge numbers of possibilities can be checked.
In many cases this is augmented by a database of opening sequences, which is used to give the computer a head start, so to speak.
The computer algorithm works out, for example, what is likely to happen 5 or 6 moves from now if it should move a piece to a certain place. It runs through all possible moves, looking at each one and the likely consequences of it, before deciding exactly what move to execute.
No human can possibly consider anything like the number of moves a computer can, but a truly excellent player stands a chance because look ahead methods are far from flawless.
http://www.themeparks.ie
I don't know where you got the statement that
Deep Fritz beat Deep Blue, but it's obviously
false given that Deep Blue never played anyone
but Kasparov.
There were single-chip versions of Deep Blue on
the web for a while, so it could be that they beat
such one. But its more than 400 times slower than
the full Deep Blue.
Also, the win vs. Kasparov was in a blitz game.
Computers have long been superior in those fast
games.
This is marketing people. Many here don't seem
to realize chess in multimillion business, and
lying is ok if it makes you sell better.
--
GCP
Sounds like another shitty event... Will the manufacturer help their machine with a team of chess "pros" giving it advices (at every move) ? Maybe the will win one out of many so that they can brag about being the best. /
I'd like to see the wetware trump the hardware/software and as someone else mentioned there is human creativity, but there is only a finite space for creativity in a game of chess. And if you can compute every possible move you must be computing the creative moves along with the not so creative ones. It's not like you can find a whole new way to move the pieces or something.
What I'm wondering is has the trip to space, perhaps allowed cosmic rays to mutate the program so that it now plays better than ever before. Return of the mutant space chess program =)
There is no way you could fit all possible chess games in 40GB of disk space.
Let me give you an example. I realise I'm oversimplifying things here for ease of maths, but it's just a demo anyway. Consider the following, which, by the way, does not try to take account of pieces which are taken - but nevertheless, gives an example of the storage required.
In chess, there are 16 pieces per side. This means there are 16*16 possible combinations of first move (for each side). Assuming you are storing chess moves in 2 bytes (possible, but compact - given no index space is given here), that's 512 bytes for the first move. when you get to the second move, though, you hit 16*16*16*16 possibilities. Suddenly, that's 131072 bytes - 128K. For each additional move, using these raw calculations, you need 256 times more space.
Your 40GB disk will cover slightly less than all the combinations possible for four moves of chess, based on my calculations. Sorry.
http://www.themeparks.ie
I feel a "Code Deep Fritz" worm a brewin' "Hacked By IBM"
-DrMyke
"mmmmmmmmm, doughnuts" - H.J.Simpson; super genius
We can see that computers are always becoming more and more 'smart.' As a marketing employee for a large firm that works with thes kind of products, I think it's really sad that computers have become so advanced. Will a computer ever put a person out of a job? Just as an example, when computers first became used in the 50s, hundreds of young women who were hired to compute missile trajectories were laid off! What will come in the future? Chess matches between computers that never have to be paid? What is happening to the world?
Unfortunately, computers still cannot play chess as a whole game. They can easily be tricked and beaten by a way no human player of any decent level can be ever beaten. Just a little study of each chess program and voilas the way to kick it is found. That was proven by german chessplayer of expert strength (which is a rank below master) Edward Nemeth. You can read this story (which requires just a minimal chess understanding) here, item #129 and the author of the site has some other very interesting notes on the topic elsewhere in his diary. I wholeheartedly agree with him that computers are of excellent help in chess analysis, though!
-- "If you had fallen into a shit pit during a battle, lick yourself off and move on." - Jaroslav Hasek
Well... Vladimir has a chance if its a Linux that Deep Fritz is running on.
Look, we're all geeks here. We understand computers. Chess can be won by pure computing power alone. A semi-good algorithm with enough speed to look 10 moves ahead - every possible combination - will win over a human being. Maybe it's 12 moves. Maybe 15. Doesn't matter. Enough cycles per second and you don't have to have a very good algorithm.
There are so many things we humans can do that we haven't even begun to figure out how to make computers able to do. True intelligence in computers is a long way off.
Me: "Hey, computer, last night at the club I was at, there was this really hot chick with red leather pants, get her number for me."
Computer: "There were 3 ladies with red leather pants at the club last night. Which one should I search for?"
Me: "The one with black hair, sitting at the bar, drinking some red slushy drink with two of those tiny little straws, looking like she wanted me real bad."
Computer: "Oh, that one. Not really your type, but I'll see what I can do."
Imagine what that computer has to be able to do. Scan through the video of the club; identify individual people; correlate the image from the video with images from other cameras; find out where she lives or works from that (likely work - less privacy there); somehow get from there to her phone number. (I don't know how - if you get here home address, you can just hack into a utility company's database. If at work, hack into their phone list. Get her name from an audio feed somewhere. Doesn't matter.)
That's the kind of things we should be working on. Because I really need that phone number.
No one else ever played Deeper Blue. Immediately after the chess match, they took the computer apart and refused to let anyone else play it.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
you have never even considered the possibility that as knowledge of the brain increases, people will think faster and faster too
---
>Nope, you got it wrong. Deep Thought was the
>supercomputer used to find the answer to the
>question of life, [snip]
Deep Thought was a chesscomputer made by the
same team that made Deep and Deeper Blue and
was its direct predecessor. Deep Thought was
tuned fully automatically. Deep/Deeper Blue
had manual tuning on top of that.
What do you think I got wrong?
>It was basically tuned with the assumption that
>it would be playing Kasparov and so many people
>think that a different grandmaster could have
>beaten it.
Kasparov stated this directly after the match,
but there has been no evidence to illustrate it
whatsoever.
He also claimed a human was helping the machine
as well.
--
GCP
A large number of serious chess players don't like variants too much.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
Computer chess suffers many limitations that human beings do not. These limits are being extended, but they still exist and the human being in this match should not be counted out.
Many people think that since IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov that the debate has been settled that computers are better than people. However, there where some aspects of the way that match was played that gave the computer a decided advantage. Kasparov never got a chance to see any of Deep Blue's games. Kasparov never got a chance to play any warm up matches against Deep Blue. In otherwords, Kasparov went into the match "blind" as far as his opponent was concerned.
Deep Blue, on the other hand, had complete access to every professional game that Kasparov ever played, and a team of GM's working with the programmers to twink the machine to take advantages of weaknesses pin-pointed in Kasparov's games. In match play, preparation is the key to success. Against Deep Blue, Kasparov wasn't allowed to prepare.
This match is decidedly different. Kramnik has been given a copy of the program and the hardware to run it. He has been given time to analyze how the program plays and to see what weakness it has.
Moreover, Kramnik is a very positional player, whereas Kasparov was a very tactical player. Computers excel at complex tactics, even as good as Kasparov was, he can't out calculate a computer. However, that isn't the only way to play chess. Kramnik excels at finding positional improvements that will see their point well beyond the analysis horizon of the computer.
Kramnik has a very strong record against some of the best computers in the world. Including Fritz and Deep Junior - too offerings from the same company that makes Deep Fritz.
It is simply ignorance which would allow anyone to think that at this point in time the outcome of this match is a foregone conclussion. Certainly at some point in time the computers will be far better than people at Chess. But it is not the case that we are at that point today.
And for chess players and fans, this match promises to provide some very interesting games that will be well worth studying. And perhaps that aesthetic aspect is actually the point?!
Kasparov also didn't have access to Deep Blues previous games. Deep Blue knew how Kasparov played.
Anyway, we are talking Blitz Chess here. Does anyone think a human could beat a computer in a non-timed game?
--Mike
Hell, they still need humans to actually move the chess pieces.
/ 2218236&mode=thread">no they don't.</a><p>
c tTemplates/product.asp?sub=1189&cat=1181&S KU=6460">slightly lower tech</a>...
Um, <a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/31
Or, <a href="http://www.heartlandamerica.com/HTMLA/Produ
Perhaps he meant that there is a finite number of positions of the pieces on the board. No matter how many times you move in a circle the computer program is assured that you will be on one of 64 squares, as will all of the other remaining pieces.
Where I'm from, those are called pawns.
DeanT
There is no such thing as "top of evolution", just something for all, each species has it's own ecological niche - AI's niche (computers) certainly isn't same than that of humans, thus, we don't really compete, and neither one has no reason to kill another one.
> Even more important is the fact that we need
> not search the full search tree (indeed Deep
> Blue did not, using instead something called
> singular extensions)
Misconception: Singular extensions still
work with a normal full width alpha beta
search - they just extend the depth
of nodes w/ forcing moves.
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
1) Kramnik and Fritz are very credible champions. Fritz has consistently beaten all other chess programs and Kramnik beat Kasparov last year and has continued to play well this year. 2) I think this match will be an incredibly interesting match. The Deep Blue match received over 70 million page impressions 4 years ago...so its exciting to think how many people will tune in this time around. 3) Why is everyone so negative about this match.
Please... please oh god please... tim.... just post news shit, don't add your stupid comments.
Where is the reference in the link? I cant find anything on analysing invalid positions in there on a first glance.
chess is not a "game" in the game theory sense of the word. Every move has known, predicatable consiquences
...the player cannot predict with complete precision all possible outcomes of a given play
Now, consider poker.
I thought predicting the possible outcomes of a poker game and a chess game is pretty much the same problem. You can see your cards, and in most forms of poker you can see some of your opponents cards. So you can predict the possibility of given hands, and make your bets accordingly.
Krispy Cream is people
I disagree. There is a point that some of us here do not seem to be aware of: chess is a game of strategy and these computers have no idea of what strategy is. They apply brute-force algorithms and raw positional evaluation to circumvent this problem but they just don't "understand" chess as we humans do. Their horizon is limited by their processing power, and the problem they face is exponentially complex. Kramnik, Kasparov, Anand and major grandmasters have an understanding of the game that is completely different and goes far beyond what today's computers can handle. This does not mean that humans win surely all the time, of course, computers do have their fair share of points by exploiting their considerable tactical superiority. Nevertheless it is my pronostic that Kramnik is considerably superior to his computer opponent and that he will win.
One of those things are creativity. A human can very easilly come up with new ideas that has not yet been thought of. The brain can link things together in a way that a computer still (and probably never will be able to) cant do.
Anotherone is the ability to learn and adapt to unknown situations. A few days ago on
Regardless of how I see it, I see the human as the winner. Either we successfully create an ally that can help us, or we are still smarter. Just see the computer as an extention to the brain, and we are all winners :-)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
dev null ziggy offered two-to-one, not me :)
:)
I did offer $20 on the computer in the "dept" line, but mine would be a straight bet, not 2-to-1. And that's not $20 for all takers, or I would be risking too much of my future earnings
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Try arithmetic instead of mathematics and I'll buy it.
>A computer can only be as good as the person who
>programmed it to play chess!
This is so wrong...
This is like saying that a computer is only as
good in mathematics as the programmer that programmed it.
Don't think so.
--
GCP
Whenever I'm tempted to feel depressed about computers besting humans in chess, I simply remind myself that as good as computers are at it, not one of them realizes that they're playing a game of chess. The day they can come up with a computer that can do that, then I'll be impressed. Otherwise they're just pushing around symbols that mean nothing to them. Very very good at pushing around the symbols, but still...
When it comes right down to it, plain brute calculation capability is a real yawn compared to experience, feeling, qualia, etc.
-Tyler
Happy people make bad consumers.
Not quite. They programmed Deep Blue, for example, by feeding it's heuristical engine with data from thousands of previous games. This data, together with the learning ability of the machine and the raw computation power yields to a chess computer far more effective than the people who programmed it. Not that it neccessarily is any better than a human being: Deep Blue didn't win every game against Kasparov, it merely won more games in the turney.
I do not think I used arguments to the effect of "computers can compute millions of moves a second, and humans can only think of...
5 9*71 group elements. A computer will choke if it tried to compute such a group by brute force (somebody figured this out in 1980 by piecing together a zillion theorems).
Nope I agree....and...
Increase in computing power results in increase in playing power. This means computers can get arbitrarily good at chess in finite time.
I agree with this too....but I don't agree that it is inevitable that computers will beat the human simply because processing speed will become so overwhelmingly fast that humans will not be able to out-compute the them.
Chess is like a math problem. When I say "math problem", I mean it is a "classification problem". There are a lot of problems in math that are stated much like a chess game. Examples are the four-colour problem, the classification problem in Algebraic Topology ("what are the topological invariants that characterises a topological space?"), etc. These are very simply stated, but a computing machine will find it hard to even start to break it down into manageble pieces. An example of a recently solved "math problem" is of that of the classification problem of Group Theory. One of the "odd group" is called the Monster Group, and it has 2^46*3^20*5^9*7^6*17^2*13^2*17*19*23*29*31*41*47*
My point is that human intuition is not easily replaced by brute computer power.
Now tell me which part is improving more rapidly: computer or man. (snipped theory stuff)
The computer will always lag behind the human in terms of theory (unless it can solve the above classification problem), since it is the humans who are going to figure out the theory first before being converted into an algorithm that can be fed into the computer. Of course, Kasparov may join a computer group, and then figure out a Theoretical NOvelty (some new move) and program that in. But then, who is improving, the computer or the human?
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
All this human vs computer chess matches are plain dumb and prove nothing. No one claims that a calculator is smarter then a human because it can find the cube root of 43469873629 faster then a human. A computer playing chess just evaluates all possible moves, and the algorythm is a modification of the maze-deadend-backtrack we all learned in 2nd semester programming. Now a game that has a random factor, like axis and allies or monopoly, now that is a challenge to program.
Chess players have spent nearly their entire lives studying the way pieces move around the board, whether they realize it or not. They can see several moves into the future more easily than a chess novice with equal intuition. That said, I would be far more curious to see how a chess player would handle playing a different game. What I mean by this is change the rules of chess slightly, then allow 3 days for both computer programmers and human challenger to learn/recode the new rules and strategies.
Sample rules changes could involve knights moving orthogonally 2:2 instead of 2:1, or having a borderless board, where if you move off the left you come in on the right side (like Pacman), or marking a few squares as off-limits for the whole game, etc.
I think that some of these rather simple alterations of the rules would drastically alter subsequent gameplay. I also think that a chess novice would do roughly equally well in the various scenarios (albeit rather crappy in 'classical' chess). But more interestingly, how would the chess expert do? Would these new rules to him be like learning an entirely new game? Suddenly he wouldn't have the benefit of 20+ years of practice, and would have to 'see' things as they were for the first time.
I would be very interested to see how the great chess masters would do against computers in these situations. People often hype the human/AI chess games as battles to see whether computers are smarter than people. I think 'modified' chess would be a more interesting study. Do the great chess players really possess that much more wisdom and foresight, or is it some experience acquired by 20+ years of watching the pieces move.
I posted this idea on /. a few years ago, and I got some angry replies from chess players indicating that chess is all intuition and that rules changes wouldn't matter. Well, anybody care to find out?
make world, not war
It's the programmer. So in effect he is competing against programmers not the machine.
This is nothing unusual. In many chess tournaments, even the loser still wins a sizeable amount of money. Consider it as a kind of gage to remunerate their willingness to participate (and to risk some of their prestige if losing).
Do men have a fear of death instinctually progrmamed into them? Ask the hundreds of babies that fall out of windows each year, or ask the ones that fall down stairs, or the ones that drink from the bleach bottle. Fear is something that is learned that keeps us alive. It is different from a reflex (i.e. fight or flight).
But that is a lesson for another day. Go ahead, argue with me. You'll lose.
Nope, you got it wrong. Deep Thought was the supercomputer used to find the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Deep Blue was IBM's first attempt at beating Kasparov. The second attempt was Deeper Blue. IBM was assisted by one of Kasparov's rivals when tuning Deeper Blue. It was basically tuned with the assumption that it would be playing Kasparov and so many people think that a different grandmaster could have beaten it.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Even if this guy should beat the computer, that should not lead anyone to having illusions about the future. Eventually, computer chess superiority will be a fact. Even though the program running on Deep Blue could beat Kasparov, that day is not today. The very fact that we are unsure whether Validimir Kramnik or the computer will win clearly proves this.
One reason that computers inevitably will beat us humans is that each year, computers get exponentially faster, which means the chess programs can search linearly deeper in the game search tree. It's simply a matter of waiting untill they are unbeatable.
However, that wait might be very long, but to top things over, algorithms are improving too. Some have thought in the past that our game-tree search algorithms were pretty close to optimal, but for example some of Aske Plaat's research clearly shows that this is far from the case, and that the old predictions about optimal performance was based on too simple and fundamentally unsound principles. Substantial improvements can be made. (not that I have anything to do with him. I don't know him and live in another country)
Even more important is the fact that we need not search the full search tree (indeed Deep Blue did not, using instead something called singular extensions). Rather, if we can make a heuristic that tells us which parts of the search tree are "interesting" we can skip the rest and only concentrate on those areas. In this way, computer chess is becoming a little more like human chess (though not much). The point is, as those "this part of the tree is interesting" heuristics get better, so will computer chess programs get better.
In short, the future of computer chess is bright, and we might have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Human superiority or even something resembling it simply will not last. Chess will neither be the first nor the last game where computers will always beat a human.
Bjarke Roune
Hacked by Chinese!
The same thing as always will happen: Human loses first game, then figures out redundant program, proceeds to winning with ease.
Berto
All human infants instinctively know how to swim from birth through the first few months of life or so. I wish that I could still remember, as my ability to swim now is clumsy at best.
okay, i can see how you're misunderstanding the problem. but from a game theoretical perspective, the analysis of both chess and poker are very similar.
the element of probability really does not change the nature of the problem very much. i suspect you have a bias against chess or for poker. that's fine, i certainly have a bias against poker (how do you call it a game of skill if you can lose to an untrained monkey while playing an optimal game? and that's really the only consequence of adding an element of chance into a game...)
anyway, if you want to talk about game theory, i suggest you check out 'fun and games' by binmore. it's a mid level undergrad - low level grad textbook, and pretty instructive (if a bit flippant).
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
I think we will see 2 wins by Kramnik and the rest will be draws. Kramnik is a very stable and player who doesn't usually sacrifice material or go into complications. Plus Kramnik's endgames are second to none in the world. Kramnik will use the same strategy that he used as black against Kasparov. Which was to go from the opening into the endgame. This is a huge disadvantage to the computer because they do not play endgames very well without very large table bases. Kramnik also has the advantage of studying several Deep Fritz games before the match. Kasparov did not have this luxury vs. Deep Blue. If he did have that would have made a big difference. But that isn't the only reason that Kasparov lost that match. He should have adopted a slow positional style similar to Karpov or Kramnik's. Of course I may be biased towards Kramnik because his favorite first move is 1. Nf3 :)
Computers, from almost the start, have been superior to the human mind in very specific tasks. Precise and fast calculations, for example.
In Chess, the rules are static and well-defined. But the number of possible moves becomes very large over the course of a game. It's only in the last few years that the computers started winning against the best.
To lay to rest your concerns, think about all the man-hours used in development of this machine.
I don't read AC A human right
Those who play computer games will know that playing against humans is more challenging and interesting any day than playing against the AI. Is this a limitation of the processing power/programs available to PCs or is it a fundamental limitation with computers?
Much of the difference (at least for the kinds of games I play) results from the fact that human beings have an easier time processing natural language than computers do. Thus, you get the entire psychological game of taunts ("0wn3d!") in addition to the game of chess, q3a, etc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There was a fine discussion of computer GO strategies in the oldmanmurray forum about a month ago.
Let's stick it to The Man!
Deep Blue win was marketing hype. For a chess playing computer to win fairly, (yes, deep blue cheated.) a stable program that understands the game needs to play. Deep Blue had programmers adjusting it play nightly. So if a human makes unique play would confuse it, programmers could correct the error during the play. So Deep Blue's win was a beta test, not a turniment.
A computer can only be as good as the person who programmed it to play chess!
You were expecting a sig?
Now, would the results be the same for a not-so-fixed logic game, such as a wargame?
Those who play computer games will know that playing against humans is more challenging and interesting any day than playing against the AI. Is this a limitation of the processing power/programs available to PCs or is it a fundamental limitation with computers?
So then why do babies cry? Why do we get hungry? Once we know that certain things are dangerous, we instinctually try to avoid danger and pain. Our instincts try to gain pleasure and avoid pain.
The human contender will stand a chance only if he's allowed to study the computer's style. Kasparov lost because IBM wouldn't let him see transcripts from games, while they were programming Deep Blue specifically to play Kasparov. And even then Kasparov still won a game . . . .
What ever happend to Bobby Fisher? He was/Is the best. I bet he could kick the crap out of 10 of those chess "puters'"
-DrMyke
"mmmmmmmmm, doughnuts" - H.J.Simpson; super genius
oops, should have been 45*44*43 of course, silly me. Probably made some other mistakes as well. Bad idea to do combinatorics today.
I bet the computer is an Amiga.
-DrMyke
"mmmmmmmmm, doughnuts" - H.J.Simpson; super genius
So, while 10 move lookahead may give much better results than 5 move lookahead, 25 vs 20 offers much less advantage. This seems to be the case with othello, in my experience, where strong programs can do 24+ midgame searches (where the game is only 60 moves long).
Speaking of Othello, it's interesting to note that right about the same time as the '97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match, the Othello world champion, Takeshi Murakami (and champion again as of 2000), played a 6 game match against the program Logistello. Logistello won that match 6 games to 0.
wouldn't it be a fairer chess match if the size of the computer (sans the power supply) was limited to the size of kramnik's brain?
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Why do you pay $40 for a new game? From reading this it sounds like the PC game companies should be paying us to play their games! Imagine if Blizzard payed you $10 to get a Diablo character killed,and $20 if you kill Diablo?
In his attempts to get Deep Blue "out of the book" Kasparov made some very twisted transpositions of standard openings, including the ridiculous looking rook pawn for opening move (or was it knight pawn .... same diff). The net result was that Gary outsmarted himself.
Since opening play is the most analyzed aspect of the game, it would make more sense to save the variations for the early middle game.
Calculating these probabilities for poker is by no means difficult. It is computationally perfectly feasible to calculate the probabilities of every possible hand your opponent may have and base your strategy on that. All combinations of three cards out of a stock of 52 - 7 (5 your own cards, 2 the cards of the opponents you can see ) = 45^3 = 91125 probabilities in your state space. No problem whatsoever.
The state space increases with the number of rounds you can bet and the amounts you can bet, but it does not seem to really blow up in your face as all possible games of chess does.
Also here, no surprises, just probabilities.
These matches are unfair! Computers playing chess, of course the human is gonna win, it's a damn human game. How bout we even it up a little by having Kramnik beat Deep Fritz in a game of BATTLE BOTS!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Heh, I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that :-) Incidentally, did you ever notice that the voice actor for Seann, King of the Mountain Fairies and Leader of the Knights of Stardust also starred in another well-known film that year?
I can just imagine, some time in the future, two chess computers from the same codebase facing off...
ava.tar: "I'm gonna show you a trick the programmers taught me when you weren't around... oh, and another thing: I'm glad you changed your class B IP, you son of a ..."
b|4cK\\`0|f: "Hacked by Chinese!"
...chess is not a "game" in the game theory sense of the word. Every move has known, predicatable consiquences, and all the data is available to both sides during play.
Does anyone have all the data on white moving a given pawn as its first play? What shall white do for its next move? Can black predict it? Consider chess to be exclusively a two-player game (or computation, or whatever)--black versus white. But poker, in a bizarre sense, always has at least three: a player, his opponent, and chance, each with their own secret information which the others cannot use to aid their own decisions.
I would be interested in seeing the definition of "game" according to game theory. Prisoner's Dilemma has neither the complexity of chess nor the chance element of poker, what with only two moves and four possible outcomes. I call it a game. What does game theory call it?
No, no, no -- those uppity computer scientists have it all wrong. Instead of rehashing old search algorithms, they need to start inventing a Russian computer. When will they ever learn?
no body
Happy people make bad consumers.
OK, given that you have 5 of hearts and 6 of spades showing, with 7 of diamonds, 8 of clubs, and 2 of spades in your hand. You are playing against a single opponent, who is showing 3 of clubs and 3 of diamonds. Your draw. What is your optimal move?
You don't have all the information. You can go by the probabilites that discarding the 2 and drawing to either end of the straight has the highest probability of giving you a strong hand, but little do you know that the next three cards are 2 of clubs, 3 of spades, 3 of hearts. By drawing one, your opponent draws 2 and gets 4 of a kind to your garbage. Had you discarded three cards, kept the 2, and drawn, you would have had two pair to one pair and won the hand.
In chess, you know EXACTLY what possible outcomes exist, and you can, in theory, precisely compute the path through the state space (assuming your opponent is equally skilled and has equal memory and computational resources.) to the best possible solution. In games of chance such as poker, you simply cannot, no matter what computational resources you and your opponent have. That is the difference between a "game" and a computation.
Personally, I don't play either chess or poker. However, the whole wonder of true games theory is in analyzing games in which the very rules of the game prevent you from having perfect data. In the big blue room, you very rarely have perfect data.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Wow, I can't believe that without shame you put humans so different to animals by saying we don't have instinct... congratulation, first time I hear that.
You tells us that baby gazelle runs because it knows it has to and this is instinct... does it occure to you that when baby gazelle borns it is not poping up alone but it has a mother wich might have seen that she should make her baby act so, and yes, I think also that she can communicate with her baby.
Yes I believe that humans have a fear of death instinctually progrmamed into them, I just don't think that a baby on the border of a window will realize that he can die.
And learning will make its instinct tell him that it's dangerous, then he will feel the fear.