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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."
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
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.