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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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).
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?
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?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
(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)