Kramnik and Deep Fritz Draw, Tied Before Final Game

iskander writes "Man and Machine were content to draw in game 7 of the Brains in Bahrain match. Now it's all down to the final game, in which Kramnik will enjoy the advantage of playing with white. It is worth noting that game 6, in which Kramnik may have resigned too early, was found to be a probable draw with best play, and that Kasparov lost to Deep Blue by tossing a drawable game. However, whereas Kasparov could only excuse himself (unconvincingly) by claiming that Deep Blue had been assisted by a human during play, Kramnik could simply request the adjudication of game 6 on the grounds of infractions committed by Deep Fritz, who is rumored to have heckled Kramnik with its Shakespearean chatter througout the game. :) So, will Dirty Fritz win it all or will Humanity's champion "rise above the chatter" and win back the crown for us? If you think you know, you may want to place a bet or register your opinion on the ChessLines survey soon, because the match ends tomorrow."

Comments

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion Deep Fritz will never beat Kramnik in a Berlin Defence. The team could try to deviate earlier, perhaps by closing the position with 4.d3, but this will also be easy play for Kramnik. They could also skip the Ruy Lopez altogether and play 3.Bc4 (Italian) or 2.f4 (King's gambit) instead, but these moves are not so common among the extreme elite. Kramnik would probably equalize comfortably against these moves. IMHO the team should try either switching to 1.d4 or just try to head for equal but tactically complicated positions after the King's gambit or the Italian, mentioned above. Playing 1.c4 or 1.Nf3 would probably be unwise. Kramnik knows these waters extremely well and could probably easily steer the game to a dull and totally safe position.

Re:computer versus people chess

[dirvish]

evolutionary neural networks are pretty damned cool. You have a generation of networks compete against each other, then keep the best ones and kill off the rest. They you make mutant copies of the good ones and have them compete against the original good ones. Then repeat until you have a good neural network.

Re:Links to all the games

[Bonker]

Isn't it sad that people who post links feel the need to post as AC's to keep from being modded down as karma whores?

Positive moderation, people! Positive, not negative!

That said, it looks like to me like Fritz is going to win this one. I would say that Karmnik is showing signs of fatigue from playing against a 'perfect' oponnent. If I were him, I'd try to take a few days off before the next match to regain his mental and emotional endurance for the last match.

Game Tree

[Quill_28]

Excuse me for my lack of knowledge on the subject, but why can't a game tree for chess be made?
I know it would be huge and take a long time to traverse, but isn't chess just like tic-tack-toe? Just on a much-much larger scale. And wouldn't it be a matter of time before it is impossible to beat a computer at chess? Just like you can't beat one at tic-tack-toe? What am I missing?

Re:Game Tree

[mikeee]

The game tree is Too Big. Mmmm, say 10 possibilities per move, 40 moves per player in the game is a tree of size

10^80

Ouch.

For all we know, it might be that white or black can always win with perfect play (although most people guess perfect play on both sides will produce a draw, but we don't know, even though there clearly is an answer).

Chess, how boring...

[Q3vi1]

Chess is still basically able to be brute forced by the large super machines, which is an intruiging feat, but I don't really concider it AI. Now, if we were able to get a computer that is able to match wits against the best Go players, I would be very impressed. Go is a very simple game to learn, but very difficult to master. There is more depth and complexity in Go than there would be in chess, therefore I concider that more of a challenge for AI.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

Must suck to not actually play chess, just criticize it.

The difference between chess and Go is phenominal. Weights of pieces, sacrifices, all towards a common goal. What's the point of Go? All the same, building "fences" and occupying territory.

Who wins at 9Dan perfect play with Go?

Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth? Hell no. I'm growing so tired of this new wave of Go fanactics boasting about how much better it is than chess.

I've never met one decent Go player who could come close to beating me at chess (I'm well under a Master) -- if chess is so easy, why can't you beat me? If it's so boring, why are their over 10^80 possible moves to be made? Lets see you brute force that, considering chess can result in victories by purposeful imperfect play.

Please go and read about chess computers, and about how they don't brute force (At least not the decent ones) -- they do heuristics based upon other games, cross referencing libraries and doing simple depth traversal on position.

Why are most computers so easy to beat? They rely on material/mate rather than position. You can bait a computer to be into a poor position by targeting "easy" mates that have a catastrophic counter move. ...therefore I concider that more of a challenge for AI.
Since you seem to be an expert on AI, could you define it please? Could you define what, exactly, it would take for you to concider[sic] a chess computer as AI? You need to go read up on common algorithms for chess computers.

Not true

[Bastian]

Brute force is the most popular method; and it is the main one used by computers like Deep Blue. There are other approaches to computer chess that do attempt to recognize patterns on the board. I have a friend who is working on a chess program that knows how to 'play for position.'

As for learning from mistakes, there are chess programs with libraries of games that add games they are playing to the library - doesn't that count as learning from mistakes? How about multiple-heuristic chess programs that modify their heuristics in-game to try to match their style to the style of their opponents?

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[swordgeek]

What are you on about???

Kasparov was a whiner, a jerk, and a bad sport. This was known long before he started competing against computers.

Kramnik, on the other hand, has given chess a good name again. He's been polite to those around him, and conceded his mistakes when he's made them.

What did he do? He didn't say a word about the rumoured Shakespeare taunting, as far as I can tell. If he did (and it was true), he could probably get Fritz disqualified entirely; but instead, he's playing chess to the best of his abilities.

Or am I wrong?

Re:7th and final game?

[Skeezix]

Yes, having white is considered an advantage by most because you have the first move and you can maintain "initiative", that is you can dictate to some degree what direction the game moves in and keep up pressure on black. Of course one sub-par move and black may seize the initiative.

Re:"Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!"

[leonbev]

Yes, it's pretty sad when the computer seems to have a more vibrant personality than the human player :)

Blondie24 learned checkers via ENN

[oncewasclever]

Blondie24 is a PC program that plays checkers (draughts) at an internationally recognised expert level. The clever thing is that Blondie24 taught itself to play via Evolutionary Neural Networks. The programmers just coded in the rules for moving, then unleashed it on itself for six months, selecting the winner of each tournament to breed the next generation. OK, I am simplifying but you can read about it in the book. Because the programmers are such crappy checkers players they tested Blondie24 by playing the program against humans on Microsoft's game site. Blondie24's rating puts the program in the top 5% of players. Note that there is another program, Chinook, that is the current man-machine world champion checkers program, but chinook was programmed using human expert knowledge and plays using brute force. Blondie24 has NO human knowledge about the game programmed in.

artificial artificial intelligence

[solferino]

my fave story about chess playing 'programs' :

(first came across it in levy's hackers book, did a quick search on google and came across this page which relates the story)

the story takes up from just after the arrival of the first PDP-1 at MIT (1961)

The PDP-1 was installed in the "kludge" room, which was the room next door to where the TX-0 was housed. The hackers wasted no time in converting over much of the TX-0 software to the PDP-1, and in fact they wasted no time in writing new programs.

One of the most interesting and innovative was actually done as a prank. Hacking a connection between the PDP-1 and the TX-0, they created a "chat" program of sorts. They then called in Professor John McCarthy (legendary artificial intelligence pioneer and creator of the Lisp programming language) and told him they had created a new chess playing game on the PDP-1. They then called in another professor, told him the same thing and sat him in front of the TX-0. The two proceeded to send chess moves back and forth to one another, each thinking the other was a chess program. That is, until McCarthy noticed the movements were coming in one letter at a time, and sometimes lagging in between each move. Noticing the wire, he followed it to the next room and the prank was up. However, this prank was to be the first networked computer game.