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. "
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 project looks interesting, but the guy brings up the whole "we only use 10% of our brain" myth
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I have thought of this myself, although I'm too lazy to implement it.
Chess is extremely parallelizable, since each of your N possible moves must be evaluated seperately, you can divide them among your K cpus which are participating... (Deep Blue had 256 CPUS, if I recall correctly)
The only major penalty for a distrubuted venture such as this that I can think of is that cached board information can't be shared across nodes... Most chess computers cache the results of evaluating different board positions, so that you don't need to (re-)evaluate everything for different move orders which end up with the same board position.
What is it actually doing? A complete tree-search for all the legal chess moves? That's a pretty big tree! Searching for conclusions to well-known games? Trying to crack into a Norwegian librarian's database?
There are something like 10^120 positions (nodes in the search space) (source: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Jackson) and something like 10^78 atoms in the universe (source: The Little Book of the Big Bang, Hogan).
So if every atom in the universe could do one chess position per say, nanosecond (10^-9 seconds), and had been computing since the Big Bang (15 billion years ago), the computation would still be in its earliest stages.
(Note: I stole this argument from somewhere, but can't find the exact quote or reference.)
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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.