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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
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.
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.
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...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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