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."

Comments

computers play Chess well, but suck at GO

[andi75]

Computers play Chess quite well, they're even stronger at Checkers, and they rule at Connect 4 (a friend of mine has written the strongest freeware checkers and c4 programs, check them out).

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

Sidenotes to the Deep Blue - Kasparov Match

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Chess Rules Changes (Human vs. AI)

[wass]

I think a far more interesting 'battle of the brains' tournement between computer and human would involve something that as quite, but not entirely unlike, chess. I've spoken with some friends about this idea, and they agree.

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?