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Men vs. Machines
FFriedel writes "In October classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik is scheduled to play Deep Fritz in Bahrain. Now Garry Kasparov, who lost his title to Kramnik in 2000, but is still ranked as the strongest player in the world, has announced that he will play the computer chess world champion Deep Junior in Jerusalem at almost exactly the same time. Both programs are distributed by ChessBase. In 1997 Kasparov lost his famous match against Deep Blue."
That's bull. How is chess harder than the turing test? It has pretty much been proven that brute force calculation can win the game of chess. We still have very little idea of how to beat the turing test. I would say the chess is infinitely easier than the turing test...
Spencer Ogden
Prior to Kasparov's match, Deep Blue hadn't played any significant chess players in matches (though I believe there was a consulting grandmaster).
At any rate, they could have provided Kasparov with a history of Deep Blue's games against other computers; they could also have provided Kasparov with Deep Blue's analyses of other match games. Either would have been easy to produce, and given Kasparov ample material to study.
I suspect Kasparov's arrogance led him not even to ask for such. He certainly didn't seem to take the match itself seriously (a mistake Kramnik is not repeating), and I don't recall hearing that Kasparov was explicitly denied those materials.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
While Deep Blue was programmed to beat Kasparov Fritz and Deep Junior were not programmed specifically for these matches. Minor things like their opening books may be altered, but the programs will be the same ones released to the general public.
Well, here's a heads up. That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other. They sit down and play through their opponents previous matches, and try to find weaknesses and holes to use against them.
The point of all this is equally questioned. People seem to think that creating large expert systems is a done deal, and no more research needs to be done into how to construct programs that use a set of variables to give advice, in this case which chess piece to move. Again, here's a clue:
This kind of stuff is fundamental, basic research. Absolutely vital and incredibly useful as we continue to learn about how to better realise and utilise computer technology.
Insert old saw about dogs walking here.
I have to take exception with your point on original thought - here's what comes to mind. You say that original thought comes from generating and discounting possible approaches. The example that came to my mind are works by MC Esher. He draws parodixes - things that cannot exist in nature. How could he have created them, being that he could *not* have encountered them, or anything simliar?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Not to debunk your entire post but....
If a human grandmaster is about to play Gary Kasaparov for instance, do you think he's likely to study as much about the way that Kasparov plays? Its just that the in this case the computer is able to forget the rest and _only_ focus on Kasparov's style. In any competition you would be foolish not to gain as much knowledge about your competition.
As for having multiple teams to win the Superbowl, ever heard of offense and defense and special teams. Its just an example of using the team that is most likely to win the play, or the game or whatever, it just so happens that these teams are all part of a larger team.
Its called specialisation and its pretty much what enabled us (humankind) to give up nomadic existence and focus on doing wonderful things like making chess playing computers and reading Slashdot instead of working.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Or maybe more of a "why would you want to":
Chessbase has several chess programs for sale on their website. While quite inexpensive (~$45-$80 USD) they are advertised as being damn near impossible to beat. In fact, Chessbase's front page highlights one of the programs for sale kicking the ass of the entire Swiss Chess Team!
So why would you want to actually buy one of these programs? They aren't teaching programs. They aren't for a friendly game against the computer. They aren't open sourced (that I could see) so you can't study the algorithms. They are meant to destroy every human they come in contact with.
Does anyone outside of chess grand masters use these things? (How many grand masters are there, anyway?) I'm a very mediocre chess player myself, and if I want my ass handed to me in chess I'll go down to the local high school club and call them all smelly virgins before starting a game. At least I'll have some face-to-face interaction.
So what's the point?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
That is a popular myth that is usually not true. While I have no doubt that any human on this planet who has attained the level of grandmaster can see 10 moves out, most of them aren't wasting the brainpower to do so. Not until at least well into the midgame when things are opening up and combinations are starting to emerge. By and large, great chess players rely on their superior knowledge of positional play and tactics to win games. This is how great players can often look at a board and instantly tell you who has the upper hand and what the correct move is. If you've ever seen an master play 20 games at once--circling around the room, staring at each board for a few seconds, then moving--it's obvious that he's relying on tactical & positional intuition, not brute-force analysis. As if to drive home this point, American GM Koltanowski famously played 56 games at once while blindfolded in 1960 and still managed to win almost all of them.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
in any event- im reminded of the checkers champion computer players... they always win. the real question is- how do they win? the answer is: by storing a set number of move in lookup tables. in other words- once a game gets to a certain point, the computer opponent looks up, in a database, a winning set of moves from the given point in the game. how is this ai? how is this 'machine bettering man' on a level playing field? the answer is that it isn't.
programming a computer to play until it reaches a point where the number of moves left in the game are finite, and the computer has a database of moves that guarantee wins from this position is not artificial intelligence- it's loading the deck.
if you really want to impress people, build a machine that has no idea what the rules are, but rather is taught the rules as it plays the game. if that machine can beat the best players in the world, then we have an argument for a machine intelligence that is both strategic and insightful.
until that point, we have nothing but technical deception; technical deception in the same sense that Eliza was programmed as an 'ai'. what it appears to be on the surface is not, in fact, what it actually is.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
The Laptop must be a great help to be sure, but he is that good. When he actually plays, he doesn't have access to the lap top (he only uses it during prep time). His opponents may have similar data bases and they all do considerable analysis of various positions including the openings and end game, because certain patterns frequently appear there that cannot be analyzed properly during a game due to time constraints.
Deep(er) Blue used some special-purpose hardware, but Deep Fritz and Deep Junior don't. Multiprocessors are a commodity nowadays.
Deep(er) Blue's custom ASICs were basically there to make the brute-force approach go faster. They didn't implement some sort of expert system or neural net, they had little to do with sophisticated position evaluation, they were mostly just there to speed up the nuts-and-bolts operations of walking extremely large decision trees.
The scorn you heap upon this post's grandparent seems just a trifle misplaced, since you yourself seem to know little about the programs being discussed. They're a combination of chess-specific knowledge and fast implementations of fairly ancient algorithms, so they're pretty formidable opponents, but in terms of AI research they've progressed little beyond an early-to-mid-80s level. Nobody that I know who actually works in AI would say any different, either.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
...and that is precisely the opportunity that was denied Kasparov. Deeper Blue and its handlers -especially Joel Benjamin - had years to dissect Kasparov's games, but Kasparov had no access to DB's oeuvre. That's not a level playing field.
Another aspect you've overlooked is that human preparation to play a particular opponent is usually on the order of weeks or months, and does not significantly sacrifice the preparer's ability to play other opponents. Even in the middle of preparing to play Kramnik or Anand, Kasparov could go to a tournament and beat just about anyone else. By contrast, DB was in preparation for years and the result was so finely tuned toward playing Kasparov that DB would have fared very poorly in any top-level tournament involving anyone other than Kasparov. That kind of inflexibility is not a hallmark of a intelligence, artificial of otherwise. What it indicates is that the basic methods were so old and so well understood that people have been able to spend years just tuning the implementation.
Making a computer beat the world champion is a respectable feat. However, it's not even the highest goal in computer chess. Making a computer that could beat a series of opponents, without fundamental changes equivalent to a brain transplant between matches, would be more impressive. Making a computer that could win a 16-player round robin tournament against a whole field of top grandmasters - something Kasparov still does regularly, to this day - would be more impressive still. Making a computer that could play speed chess better than Anand or Hawkeye would be another worthwhile challenge in a different direction. Then there's Go, and then a bunch of other challenges, and then there's the real world. Spending years to create a program that can beat one player in one chess match under less-than-fair conditions is really a pretty low goal.
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