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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."
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 ?
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
Other languages
>and they rule at Connect 4
This game has been SOLVED by Victor L. Allis.
He also invented a new tree search algorithm
which is extremely strong _when_ it can be
used.
He used a combination of this tree search and
rules (black can't win if this parttern
is present etc..) to solve it.
>about 30 at chess, 10 at checkers,
It's 38 for chess, 2.7 for 8x8 checkers (where
a comp is already world champion)
The use of tree search depends on a lot on
the tactical nature of the game. You can still
use it with a branching factor of over 100 if
the game is tactical enough. (so 5-7 ply searches
beat most humans)
But go needs more longtime planning, and you need
way more depth for that.
--
GCP
A sufficiently powerful computer will always beat a human opponent, but creativity is important for the human if he is to have a chance.
In the early days, say early 80s when the computers took their first steps in being proper opponent for good chess players humans those computers one by one by useing their lack of brute force and/or intuition against them. Boris Spasski whooped one computer beautyfully by sacrificing few king side pawns at point where even a moderate human chess player would've realized that by giving room to Spasski's rocks there'd be problems _in the horizon_. The opposing computer those days naturally couldn't predict that and Spasski indeed launched a glorious attack and won.
That was just a good example how humans usually play against computers. And this is also what Gasparov tried against Deep Blue but in vain. A nice example of where computers had gotten at that point was in one of the games, where Kasparov launched a really promising attack on the king side. It really was promising at that point and most likely any chess guru who was capable of spotting that offense opportunity would have seized it. BUT, at the decicive moment when deep blue had to decide wether to fall back and just try to minimize the damages or call the bluff it (DB) had calculated _every_ possible ending that attack could result in (and we're not talking about checking mates in 5 or 6, but serious amount of prediction) using nothing but brute force. Thus the Deeb Blue took the pawn Kasparov had sacraficed and dealth with the attack to a point where Kasparov gave up.
The throne of chess has been lost for good. 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...
(every little detail in this comment may not be 100% accurate as I can't be arsed to check the references right now, but it's by far close enough)
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