Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Chess Computing Project
jcarley writes "Just found an interesting project that is looking to capitalise on the power of unused computing cycles to develop a strong chess playing computer. Given the power in single and dual CPU chess programmes these days, if they can find a good way to efficiently parallel the anaysis this could be interesting. "
I don't know much about chess, but I thought this would be a good time to ask. Is it possible to solve chess such that the 1st player will always win? I know that it would take a huge amount of resources, if possible at all, so it would be a good distributed project.
I used to think that they'd solved Checkers, but while googling for my answer, I found that it hasn't been perfectly solved yet either.
If playing a game (albeit an interesting one) isn't what you'd like to spend your spare CPU cycles on, there's a lot more than Seti@Home out there. Check out the Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects for more options...
The problem is the algorithm in developing concurrently-processed chess calculations. The people on D.net couldn't get up enough interest to do the project, and ultimately it never got off the drawing board. Now most of those people have gone on to OGR.
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I think it would be interesting to see a competition between human and computer teams in which this distributed project is pitted against a group of the world's most talented chess players working together in something like that distributed brain-cycles story that was on Slashdot a few weeks ago (sorry, I can't find the article).
There are probably some people out there who would say this is not really fair because people need time to adjust to a playing style and everyone is different, but I say if the computer can have a thousand different computers crunching numbers for it, then why not a thousand different brains working together?
Hell, I just came up with another idea...why not program the Cyc project to use a small database that deals only with chess? Certainly there are rules that can be conveyed to it and then have the Cyc AI compete against some chess programs to see how it does.
One other consideration is, that while it seems likely (from our experience with master and grand master class players) that white has the advantage and thus whould be the likely winner if there is a winner in the solution, it has not been shown that this is the case, it could well turn out that in the "perfect" game black has the advantage as long as he makes no mistakes. It seems far more likely to turn out that the "perfect" game will be a draw, meaning that if either player makes an error and the other can play perfectly from there, the player to not make the error will win. (and error being any move that takes a branch on the tree that leads to a forced loss for the player who made the move). For example, tic-tac-toe can be easily proven to have this type of solution, and chess might has well.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is a shame, because there are many exciting things we could do with a global chess computer. The obvious "let's play it against Kramnik or Kasparov" would actually be a lot of fun. With my computer conspiring against the human, it wouldn't be clear who I'd be rooting for!
However, there are lots of other cool things we could do with this. I assume the code itself is some sort of open source--so maybe, we could set up a team tournament, where Team Slashdot plays Team AnandTech. The various teams could also do tweaks to the code to give themselves an advantage. Or, on a larger scale, we could play a America vs Europe game, where continental patriotism would encourage you to contribute your clock cycles to victory.
Another obvious modification that is not mentioned in the documents is human intervention. This sort of computing power would be great if you want to investigate a certain line of play, but this in combination with the human intuition of Grandmasters should be able to coax the computer to give privilidged analysis to certain lines over others. Otherwise, the computers would crank away on the unpromising lines just as much as the ones that might realistically be played.
It is this, the sort of human-directed chess machine that has the potential to show us some of the greatest chess games ever witnessed. This is some exciting stuff. ...
Well, potentially. However, the intentions of the ChessBrain authors is so far totally mysterious, and I think that's a shame. They seem like nuts-and-bolts people, and these distributed projects need "vision" people to attract a lot of CPUs. I don't have many clock cycles to spare, but I know I'd have a hard time resisting if I could contribute to my continent's victory over our transatlantic enemies. Apart from that, working out a system where this chess super-computer could serve as a tool to augment the play of teams of Grandmasters (or vice versa) would be genuinely interesting from a research point of view, as well as being perhaps the most exciting chess event ever.
Anyway, if ChessBrain doesn't turn into any of these things, I hope another distributed chess project does.