Slashdot Mirror
4th Computer Chess Tournament
An anonymous reader writes: "The 4th computer chess tournament is being held online at Internet Chess Club over the next two weekends. Over 50 chess programs are involved, from commercial engines to amateur homebrews. Most will be operated by their authors. Details at CCT4 homepage. Last tournament (CCT3) there was live commentary by titled human chess masters. If you're a fan of chess or computer chess programming, login to ICC this weekend as a guest and watch the action."
Especially with no speed throttle on the chess programs, I would imagine a normal game could be over in a few seconds.
I'd like to see a distributed chess engine. I think it would be fun to pit us against Deep Thought. It's kinda off topic, but something I've been thinking about.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
I was reading through the biography of Claude Shannon (information theory guy) and was surprised to read that he also did important research in chess-playing computers. The biographer suggested that his innovations are still in use today. Does anybody know more about this? How do you program a computer to play chess, anyway?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
If you want to play your own game of chess against people all over the internet, check out SICO . People take turns playing a single move in all sorts of wacky variations. It's weird but addicting...
It pains me that on a site dedicated to open source that we should entirely ignore the history if ICC. Once there was the Internet Chess Server (ICS) which was free, source could be obtained and all. Then one of the people maintaining the server decided to make it propietary and charge for membership. Of course a splinter group decided they wanted a truly free server and that became the Free Internet Chess Server (www.freechess.org), however their lofty ideals came to an end when they saw others using their ideas and not giving back to the community (GPL does not stipulate you must distribute your software) and since then the version of the server software available to download as not been updated.
Now I don't mean to rant about percieved evils, whats done is done, but for a site dedicated to open source I believe this must be mentioned.
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. --Herbert Hoover
This article at Wired a few months back is an intriguing read on the recent history of attempts to improve chess progams and their performance versus notable humans (such as Gary Kasparov and V Kramnik).
Particularly notable (if you are a Kasparov fan) is the description of how Kasparov was, from a certain perspective, manipulated into a match setup which he could not win (wrt the Deep Blue match a few years back).
For example, he never got to view any of Deep Blue's previous games -- whereas in a human match, any world class grandmaster would certainly have studied his opponents games before hand as preparation.
Secondly, Kasparov didn't actually play the same program through the whole match -- the program was tweaked as the match went along.
This subject is quite fascinating in that some people have historically treated the 'can a computer play better than a human' question as sort of a low-level Turing test milestone.
Don't sweat it, I'm used to anonymous loons. (This one certainly doesn't work for us; our technical staff is Israeli and they all know me quite well. I worked there on the site design for seven months pre-launch.) I still cruise by the chess groups in the Usenet but am inevitably flamed as having gone over to the dark side for working with Kasparov. (I used to just write columns in my spare time on several sites.)
/. in my next editorial...
I'm also 'vice-president of content,' but that's just a typical late-20th-century dotcom title. Ahh, back when everyone was at least a VP. If ya don't believe me I'll mention
I've heard that the best openings to play against computers are the ones that are positional in nature instead of tactical. That is, computers are clumsy when it comes to general assessments of the board, whereas they are better at direct attack and defense. So human chess adepts generally avoid these tactical situations. Additionally, when chess adepts play computers, they tend to deviate from well-known or standard opening lines to get the computer "out of book" as soon as possible.
I wonder, though, if there are any particular opening strategies when computers play each other, as opposed to human v computer? It seems to me that chess programs with good opening books would almost never fall into well-documented opening traps like the one that claimed Kasparov in his losing match against Deeper Blue. Do computers stick to the tried and true main lines when playing against each other, or would employing opening "novelties" work well?
to e-mail, remove '.dot.' from the address
Hello Michael,
I have some comments. You write:
"Both Shannon and Turing spent quite a lot of time on chess algorithms. Shannon actually wrote the first chess program before a computer existed. He 'ran' the program using slips of paper and generated moves this way."
Actually it was Alan Turing, who wrote and operated the "paper machine" -- he played the role of a human CPU. A brief history of computer chess, including the game the poor man played, is available here.
"The chess programming breakdown already posted is pretty good. The key concept these days is brute force speed versus knowledge. 20 years ago most programmers thought you needed to make the thing somehow think like a human because the brute force method was so slow. Intel and Moore won. The "fast searchers" now dominate thanks to the minimax algorithm. It just looks at one line after another and counts the beans to rapidly prune. Programs differ to an extreme degree in the amount of knowledge they apply. (HIARCS, for example, is one of the few "slow" programs at the top. It applies a lot of knowledge and looks at maybe 1% of the number of positions the fast programs like Fritz and Junior check.)"
It's more like 20%. On a 666 MHz Pentium this is the speed (in thousands of positions per second) of the current top programs:
Fritz7: 300 kN/s
Fritz6: 450 kN/s
Fritz5: 520 kN/s
Shredder: 160 kN/s
Junior7: 250-435 kN/s
Tiger: 135 kN/s
Hiarcs7: 65 kN/s
Note that Fritz7 has slowed down over the years. This is because it now has a lot of general chess knowledge built in. But you cannot measure knowledge by lack of speed. Fritz7 has more knowledge than Hiarcs 7, which is a number of years old. In fact it has more chess knowledge than any other top program available today.
"Those who think chess is solvable should speak only theoretically. The number of positions is one of those great "million times the number of stars times the grains of sand in the world" numbers."
Even the number of elementary particles in the universe (10^80) is a trivially small number, silly and insignificant compared to the number of possible games up to move 40 (10^112). But the number of unique positions that can occur on a chessboard is much smaller: 10^40 (just as the number of different words in a language is much smaller than the number of potential messages that can be generated from them). These can be theoretically solved using the Thompson back-solving method you mention. But storing the results would require the matter contained in millions of galaxies, so the game is unsolvable for all practical purposes. Just imagine what Greenpeace would say if they discovered we were dismantling millions of galaxies just to store chess!
The last part of your posting seems to have been cut off. Pity.
PS: For the others: I'm Frederic Friedel and part of the Fritz team.
written by Vincent Diepeveen
the game of GO has a bigger branching factor
than Chess, which means GO programs play
way weaker than the professional GO players.
Do not forget however that in GO not so much
great programmers pushed the level of GO whereas
in chess last 30 years real serious work has
been done. In GO many things get discovered by
the few commercial programmers there are
themselves.
So obviously GO programs if thousands of researchers would have taken a look there would
play also way better than they do now.
Doesn't take away that solving the game is
going to be a much harder task.
On the other hand the start of the game in
GO is of much more important than in other
games, whereas in chess this is not true,
a single shot can ruin you. In go this is
much less likely. Most fights get local
fights and even weak players will see the
threats here sooner than weak players do
in a chessgame.
In chess usually endgame is of much bigger
importance than the openings play. Openings
play is more obvious.
So if somehow strong openings play can get
produced by programs the rest of the game is
a peanut.
Whether this is so easy has to be seen of
course because the first few moves the
branching factor is around 350 theoretical.
Nevertheless GO is very popular in the east
of this world. For europeans/americans this
game is because of its habits (i mean
playing a game without sitting on a chair
but sitting on the ground?) not going to
be popular soon either.
Obviously that means that effort in solving
the game is always going to be less than
other games (except when those get solved).