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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."
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
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.
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
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
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....
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.
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
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).
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!