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

Links to all the games

[Anonymous Coward]

Kramnik vs Deep Fritz match summary:

October 04, Game 1: Draw ----------- Article
October 06, Game 2: Kramnik wins --- Article
October 08, Game 3: Kramnik wins --- Article Analysis
October 10, Game 4: Draw ----------- Article Analysis
October 13, Game 5: Fritz wins ----- Article
October 15, Game 6: Fritz wins ----- Article Analysis
October 17, Game 7: Draw ----------- Article
October 19, Game 8: ?

Re:Links to all the games

[Anonymous Coward]

October 19, Game 8: PROFIT!!!

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.

Re:Links to all the games

[nomadic]

That said, it looks like to me like Fritz is going to win this one.

If that happens, I wonder how many of the people on slashdot who predicted an easy win for Kramnik are going to admit they were wrong. Knowing the narcissists here, not many I bet.

A sample of quotes:
For those that are interested, the verdict among the chess world is that the computer is going to be exposed as a joke in this match.

My money is on Kramnik, he will probably not lose a single game.

Re:Links to all the games

[ozbird]

Purely on the pattern of who won and draws, Karmnik should win the next one (and the one after if there was such a match.)

Re:Links to all the games

[Bonker]

Patterns don't really mean anything in this kind of circumstance since it's not a regular function. You might as well say that because you flipped a coin six times and it came up heads, heads, tails tails, heads heads, that the next two times you flip it it will come up tails.

Kramnik vs. D. Fritz is not random, but it's output is unkown, so it might as well be.

What I see is the following... Kramnik started strong. Uncertain of his oponnent, he forced a draw in the first match. Strongly, he won two matches, and then, feeling the stress of trying to outwit such a powerful machine, he drew. He lost the next two matches... one of them on an error... and drew the next one, rallying a bit. My guess is that he is mentally and emotionally exhausted from fighting such a perfect enemy. Those are the factors which will influence match 8... not the fact that he won or lost previous matches.

Re:Links to all the games

[Rader]

perfect in the sense of stamina, then.

7th and final game?

[ohboy-sleep]

I am in no way a chess master (or even a decent player) but even I know that there is an advantage to playing white. I had always thought that chess tournaments featured an even number of games, so each player have equal shots at playing black and white.

Can anyone back me up or correct me? Thanks.

Re:7th and final game?

[rsidd]

They've played 7 games already. The upcoming game is the eighth and final game.

Re:7th and final game?

[grahamsz]

I thought this wasn't proven - when they did that simulation of awari the managed to prove that perfect play always results in a draw.

There is some chance that being second to start actually gives you the advantage but it's virtually impossible to prove.

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:7th and final game?

[Yosemite_Mark]

White's advantage has never been proven for chess, but it is apparent in actual play - I think at master level, it's about a 5-10 percent winning advantage in favor of White

Re:7th and final game?

[outsider007]

So, why would white would be an advantage? Is it because white moves first? Or is there something more involved?

The first few moves decide what kind of game it will be. If you know your opponent's strengths and weaknesses it can be a very big advantage.

Re:7th and final game?

[2short]

"You mean anecdotal, not empirical. Shithead."

No he doesn't, vulgarian.

Anecdotal: "I played white last week and kicked the guys ass"

Empirical: "Examining all recorded tournament games at the master level and above, players playing white win far more frequently."

Proof: "UberFritz version 5000 has examined all possible braches of the game tree, and white can force a win in 243 moves."

Fritzy

[mojowantshappy]

Well, I would still like to see a super computer beat humans in water-polo! or foxy-boxy

Re:Fritzy

[Anonymous Coward]

Toss a live supercomputer in the pool with the human team and I'm pretty sure the match will be a draw.

Kramnik had little time left...

[Vellmont]

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 It is also worth noting that Kramnik didn't have much time left on his clock, and it would have been difficult for him to come up with the right moves given the amount of time he had left on his clock.

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:Well,

[Scarblac]

In my opinion Deep Fritz will never beat Kramnik in a Berlin Defence. [...] IMHO the team should try either switching to 1.d4 [...]

That's what Fritz has been playing in his last two White games, with rather better results than his first two Whites. Your comment would have made better sense a week ago :)

Re:Well,

[Glorat]

Correct! And what is more amusing is that Kramnik is playing White in the last game so Fritz making the first move will be tricky...

(I do agree that I could see Kramnik drawing every time with the Berlin)

Re:Well,

[JudgeDredd]

...IMHO the team should try either switching to 1.d4...

1d4?!?! How can he be rolling less than this?
He needs to use a better weapon!
And check your tables, I believe he should be rolling vs large - which would be 1d6.

Re:Well,

[Dr. Spork]

Kramnik is not going to play Berlin as white.

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.

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

[sssmashy]

See below for an example of the Deep Fritz "heckling" the human player, Kramnik. I'm surprised Kramnik was able to restrain himself from reaching across the table and ripping out its power supply.

Fritz: "Is this the scourge of France? Is this the Kramnik, so much fear'd abroad That with his name the mothers still their babes? I see report is fabulous and false: I thought I should have seen some Hercules, A second Hector, for his grim aspect, And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.

Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf! It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp Should strike such terror to his enemies."

Kramnik, normally not one to be drawn out by such taunts, proceeds to go into a long think. After a few minutes of this, Fritz disrupts him again.

And on, and on....

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

[DEBEDb]

At least Deep Fritz didn't heckle him in Russian or English

Oh, so that was Shakespeare in what, original
Klingon?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

'Twas a joke, dear knave, reflecting that envoking those words to a pedestrian American would doth giveth the resulting utterance - "Huh?"

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

[DeltaSigma]

To think that technology made possible such a disruptive, disrespectful, and slanderous player who would, today, be evenly matched with our world's greatest champion.

I suppose the entire event is saturated with symbolism though, for it was the actions of Fritz' human programmers which allowed it tongue with which to speak.

It really rather mirrors the choices a god would face when creating a people.

One might surmise that we, as humans, only commit sin as god has seen fit for us to do so. That it is his will that we sin, suffer, and make others suffer.

But then, I am no god, and I am no believer in god...

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 :)

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

[mav[LAG]]

My favourite example of Fritz's chatter was when Garry Kasparov got his copy from ChessBase and installed it. After a few games, he phoned up Frederick Friedel at ChessBase to complain about the "chatterbox" feature. Some time later he phoned again - mollified. He'd manoeuvred into a stunning position and Fritz had asked "are you Garry Kasparov?"

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

[shimmin]

It's obvious that the heckling story is a joke. Look at the photographs of Kramnick surrounded by speakers. Where did the speakers come from? You will not find them in any other stories covering any other of the games in the match.

I'm amazed how many people are thinking this is real.

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

[PurpleBob]

I was more impressed with the chatter file then I was with it's ability to play chess, the taunts were quite appropriate in their timing.

Yes, I was rather impressed with the satire in that article too.

Um, you realize that's what it was, right?

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

[JanneM]

It is possible in principle (just as the traveling salesman problem always is solvable in principle), but you have to enumerate each board - and there are too many possible boards to express in practice - ever.

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).

Re:Game Tree

[jdavidb]

It's like trying to factor products of large prime numbers; sure, you can solve the problem, but it would take longer than the oldest estimates for the age of the universe to do it. It's real, real big.

Re:Game Tree

[paule9984673]

I read this on a German discussion board:

There are 20 possibilities for a first move:

• 8 pawns (1 step)
• 8 pawns (2 steps)
• 4 possible knight moves.

Now there are also 20 possibilities for a response, that's already 400 possibilities for the first move and answer.

If you disregard the fact that the first moves may open new possibilities and keep calculating with 20 possibilities then the third move has already 8000 possibilities, the next one 160.000

After only 10 moves (5 on each side) this number alredy grows to 104.900.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 and the game has just started.

You would need a big Beowulf Cluster to build such a tree.

Re:Game Tree

[SirWhoopass]

For those who aren't familiar with big numbers, it would take a modern processor (at around 10^12 moves per second) somewhere around 3^61 years to complete that game tree. How long is 3^61 years? Well... the sun will explode at 5^9 years, long before the computer ever finished searching the tree.

Re:Game Tree

[SirWhoopass]

Oops. Should have used preview.

Sun explodes: 5 x 10^9
Computer finishes chess game tree: 3 x 10^61

Re:Game Tree

[schon]

there are too many possible boards to express in practice - ever

You sound like Bill Gates when he mentioned that thing about 640K being enough for anyone..

There may be too many possible boards to express with current computer technology (which may or may not be true - supercomputers built for analyzing weather patterns deal with huge amounts of data all the time) but saying that there will never be a computer capable of doing so is pretty short-sighted.

Re:Game Tree

[ashot]

In fact, there are more possible board positions then there are atoms in the universe...

Re:Game Tree

[Myko]

10^12 moves per second

Really?
Well, for the layman, that's:
1,000,000,000,000

Unfortuantely, the web site states that Deep Fritz is only capable of:
6,000,000

Yup, 6 Million moves per second. Guess you better get out that sunscreen if you want to wait, as it''ll take longer than previously stated...

Re:Game Tree

[JanneM]

Umm, it's more along the lines of whether there are enough atoms in the known universe to use as symbols to express it.

There is a nice parallel to the Travelling Salesman problem (find the shortest possible route through each of a number of cities). While it is in principle possible to solve it for any number of cities, in practive the problem grows so quickly with the number of cities that it is not feasible to solve it through brute force.

Chess and related problems are even worse; even if you figure out a way to solve such problems in polynomial time, you still don't have the space needed to express the solution.

This is not about current or future computer technology. /Janne

Re:Game Tree

[f97tosc]

Excuse me for my lack of knowledge on the subject, but why can't a game tree for chess be made?

You are absolutely right - this is basically how chess programs work. As many other have pointed out, it is impossible to calculate all the moves for a game. But contrary to some posts, the strategy is not meaningless. The computer will make a game tree say 5 moves ahead, then discard all of the inplausible moves, and go down another couple of levels (there is, of course, a lot of thinking that goes into specifying exactly which paths should be discarded and a lot of other details)

And wouldn't it be a matter of time before it is impossible to beat a computer at chess?

Yes, this is exactly what has happened. Only a few people in the world can deal with a computer that evaluates all possible moves 5 or more steps ahead.

Tor

Re:Game Tree

[arkanes]

Of course, this is also exactly how humans play chess :P They look at the board, evaluate the possiblities of potential moves (to various depths, depending on the ability of the player), making choices about which branches to follow and which to discard. It's in the mechanism by which you choose your branches that humans differ from computers (and not as much as they used to...), not in the mechanics of gameplay.

Re:Game Tree

[Digital_Quartz]

What would be interesting is to compute "partial game trees". For example, given game x, we can usually make a game x' which is identical except for two moves (say, for example, two pawns in the corners of the board). So the trees for these games could effectively be merged into one. Many moves are also "not productive" and don't need to be factored in. I wonder how small you could get this tree in reality? Providing lower bounds would make an interesting PHD topic. :)

Re:Game Tree

[benwb]

There's actually about 10^81 atoms in the universe. There are about 10^120 possible boards of chess (including mirror images etc) see Chess -- from Mathworld and Atoms in the Universe.

Re:Game Tree

[dvdeug]

There may be too many possible boards to express with current computer technology

You fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. It's not a matter of too many possible boards to express on current hard drives; it's too many possible boards to express if we could assign each atom in the universe a board. It is possible we could surmount the problem but it would require changing the rules, and it's like quantum computing; from the first inkling we have of it, it will take decades to get to the point to build it. (I'm personally a fan of making a chess universe, myself.)

Re:Game Tree

[stuart_farnan]

"Yes, this is exactly what has happened. Only a few people in the world can deal with a computer that evaluates all possible moves 5 or more steps ahead."

Gotta disagree here. A lot of programs look at positions more than 5 moves deep, even programs on the palm pilot can do this, and they are certainly beatable by a decent player (turn on evaluations in GNUChess). I find the same principles apply at the lower level, i.e. avoid complexities and the positional play is weak.

The point is, most humans can look 5 moves ahead in the few variations that matter in a given position, but the advantage is that the general pattern of the resulting position is easier for a human to value, because we can do this at a glance from pattern recognition. The value of a position is of course dependent on the moves that can be played after it, but if the computer is not looking any further ahead, the valuation of the position is generally not as accurate as human perception. Human evaluation is also effectively looking at future moves, its just we take a big shortcut.
The reason why computers beat humans regularly are that they generally look much deeper than 5 moves, especially in important lines (they discard some lines they don't think matter at the point of 'quiescence' and concentrate on important ones), and thus are trying to value a final position that is more developed than the position a human player would be evaluating.

Re:Game Tree

[fferreres]

That's why I NEVER chalenged the sun: he'd quit at midplay :(

Re:Game Tree

[hyoo]

10^80

How much is that in terms of library of congress'.

Re:Game Tree

[Jhan]

I've seen the stamement that there're more positions in chess than atoms in the universe many times. It's false.

Some estimates of number of atoms in the (visible) universe courtesy of Google:

• 4e78 - 6e79
• 1e78 - 1e81
• 3e78

• An upper bound of the number of chess positions: assume each square can have 15 states (white pawn, black pawn, white rook, black rook, ..., empty). Number of board states: 15^64, or about 1.96e71.

  The vast majority of those states are invalid. I've seen estimates of as little as 1e40 valid boards.

80s movies

[Allaria]

Dude, didn't you ever see Wargames?

Nuclear War. That's what happens if you try to program a computer to learn like you do.

Hmm.. Naughty Computers....

[Tha_Big_Guy23]

A quote from the article:

"At first it looked like Deep Fritz was in deep trouble. "This sort of position is our worst fear," said Fritz programmer Frans Morsch. The position was closed and Kramnik was massing his forces for a typical anti-computer crush."

This sort of position is our worst fear

I'm curious as to which position it was... Missionary? Queen on Top? With a name like Deep Fritz, one really has to wonder.

human mind v/s computer

[vivek7006]

A computer plays chess by brute force method. Unlike human beings, it doesnt have intuition and the ability to learn from mistakes. A human mind on the other hand has the ability to recognize the structural pattern of the pieces in the game, and it doesnt rely on brute force.

Re:human mind v/s computer

[chrisseaton]

Actually, I read an article sometime (not sure where, sorry) that the best, professional, chess players have a large stock of stratergies that they remember and apply to the game in hand, and that amateurs form sratergies during the game.

I'm not sure about this, however, as young gifted children, with very little experience, can also be exceptional players.

Re:human mind v/s computer

[DEBEDb]

A computer has no ability to learn from
mistakes? Is that so? How much do you know
about state-of-the-art in AI and the
design of Deep Fritz in particular?

Re:human mind v/s computer

[ashot]

The comment about not learning is most definately not true. The computer uses its ability to "brute force" as an advantage, but the technology which is being used in computers like Deep Blue and Fritz are not just game trees. Modern day AI most definatley can "learn" and adapt.
Most notable are artificial neural networks which mimic the human brain structure and constantly adapt the weight system by comparing inputs and outputs with what is expected.

Think about it.. if the code was completely determnistic, as soon as Kramnik won one match he could just play the exact same set of moves and win again.

Re:human mind v/s computer

[manly_15]

A computer has no ability to learn from mistakes? Is that so?

If computers can learn from mistakes, then how come my Win98 box keeps making the same kernel32.dll error? I can't even begin to imagine the code needed to make Windows learn from it's mistakes... likely an order of magnitude higher than the computing power needed for chess... ;-)

Re:human mind v/s computer

[fferreres]

AI and computer chess DO NOT MIX WELL...really (and computer chess programs don't even help a bit in the AI field as far as i know, chess programs are irrelevant to AI research).

You can produce smart algoriths to add chess knoledge to the chess program, but that does not equal what we'd (at least not me) call AI.

Re:human mind v/s computer

[Galvatron]

All "amateur" means is that they don't play for money. Tiger Woods was still a world class golfer, even though it took a long time before he finally decided to move up to professional. That doesn't necessarily support or refute what you read in the article, but it wouldn't overly surprise me if child prodigies could be very good, but not quite good enough to compete at an adult, professional level, because of lack of experience.

Re:human mind v/s computer

[agent oranje]

If Deep Fritz works along the same lines as Deep Blue, it can easily learn from its mistakes. Consider a simple point-system(imperfect, but widely used), in which each piece position contributes to a numeric value of the board. Let's say moving a piece to a particular square under a particular set of conditions is initially rated very highly - it's a "good move." Then, two moves later, because of that move, the computer is in mate. Obviously not a good move. If this mistake is left in how the machine "thinks," the human can just exploit this weakness. If the machine DOESN'T learn from it's mistakes, it will fail miserably.

Imagine it as a tree by which you want to get to a specific goal. If following a specific branch doesn't get you to the goal, would you ever want to follow it again?

AI isn't actually that state-of-the-art. Most of the concepts behind AI are, strangely enough, very intuitive, and the reason that AI is appearing to get better is because computational power is increasing quite rapidly. If you have the speed and memory to explore EVERY possible move in the rest of the game, why not do it? Can we do this now? No. Will we be able to down the line? Yes.

Text of the "Shakespearean chatter" article

[Anonymous Coward]

Server... is... slowing... so here's the text:

Did Deep Fritz use Shakespeare to heckle the World Champion?

It is an interesting theory: the Fritz team installed the latest chatter files during the Man vs Machine event in Bahrain, causing the machine to talk to the world champion in authentic Shakespearean verse during the game. The historical chatter drove Kramnik to distraction and prompted his ill-fated Morphy-esque knight sacrifice. That, in any case, ist how Schakespearean scholar and chess addict Michael Fischer tells it in his special report.

Kramnik versus Deep Fritz, match game 6

While the reports have not been confirmed, there has been some talk of the Fritz team having employed a clever diversionary tactic in Game Six to unsettle the World Champion, Vladimir Kramnik. Before the game, programmer Frans Morsch and the notorious - some might say nefarious - Fred Friedel apparently tinkered with the Deep Fritz program, installing the Shakespearean Chatter Files slated to appear with a future release of Fritz. Morsch thought it would give the computer better odds. Fred thought it would be funny to see Kramnik turn red and talk to himself.

The conspirators rigged up several speakers around Kramnik's chair and set them at volumes low enough that only Kramnik might hear the computer's chatter. That the computer was talking to him doubtless distracted Kramnik; that Fritz was speaking entirely in Shakespearean verse surely drove Kramnik mad, prompting the questionable, Morphy-esque Knight sacrifice at f7.

Our reports go on to say that a Bahraini match official managed to extract a full transcript from the Deep Fritz computer after the game. This transcript he then e-mailed to the chatter-file designer, S. Michael Fisher, in the USA. In a fit of good conscience, this same Mr. Fisher (no relation of Bobby Fischer) then decided to make public the entire sordid affair.

What follows is a copy of that transcript.

[long transcript follows... one excerpt below:] Fritz: "Now is it time to arm: come, shall we about it?"
Fritz: "The game's afoot."
Fritz: "What, the sword and the word! do you study them both, master parson?"
Fritz: "You are a villain; I jest not: I will make it good how you dare, with what you dare, and when you dare. Do me right, or I will protest your cowardice."
[ etc... ]

Re:Text of the "Shakespearean chatter" article

[ameoba]

It seems somewhat unsportsmanlike for a machine to be talking shit. The machine's designers would never have put in a speech-recognition module to allow the machine to understand, let alone the logic to comprehend, what was being said to it. In the Real World, between human players, shit-talking to your opponent carries the cost of having to deal with their shit-talk in return.

In other words, Fritz is taking cheap shots at Kramnik while having no such weakness itself.

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

People used to say the same thing about chess in the 50s (machines using brute force search, ah! They will never "understand" chess, blah blah blah). So now it's easy for you to dismiss chess as "brute forcable", but remember that a few decades ago no chess player imagined this would ever happen.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Tyler Durden]

I remember hearing somewhere that even given the rapid acceleration of computer power over time, it would take approximately 2 decades for computers to be a challenge to a decent Go player if they continue with the brute force method. Time to develop smarter algorithms.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[swordgeek]

Hmm.

On the one hand, I agree. Go is clearly a much more difficult game to program than Chess is, simply by the open nature of the game.

But computers are getting faster at an enormous rate. In ten years, it may be possible to have a Go program that plays at a 9Dan level, through brute force. Will that be more intelligent than these chess computers? Not in my mind.

We have to consider how the program works to judge how "intelligent" it is. If a Go program could play at a very high level with _today's_ technology, then it would have to have some sembalance of intelligence. If a Chess computer could have beat the grandmasters in 1970, then it would have been with intelligence rather than brute force.

With Chess computers heading towards a finite solution, Go will be the next target; and when the Go computers are able to beat the world's best, it'll be no more or less impressive than this, if they once again use brute force math to do it.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[JudasBlue]

This is the classic moving the goal-posts that has plauged AI since its inception as a disipline. As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.

This has happened with Chess, visual recognition, speech recognition and a host of other tests of AI techniques.

I have complete and utter faith in human nature, and am quite sure that as soon as an algorythmic strategy for effectively attacking the problem of Go is developed, people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.

Give credit where credit is due. This is many years of AI development at work.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Reality Master 101]

As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.

On the contrary, at least for me: I've never thought any of this was AI. As far as I'm concerned, there is no "science" of AI at this point. We're at the equivalent level of the greeks thinking physics consisted of the four elements of fire, water, earth and sky.

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.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[JudasBlue]

Okay, RM, that's good. But what we are talking about here is an academic disipline called AI. It is a branch of computer science. Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI. Playing chess at grandmaster level is generally acknowledged as a worthy test of some of those techniques.

This is not to be confused with science fiction and popular usage, where AI has an entirely different meaning, which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.

And in terms of waiting on Wintermute to start ringing the row of payphones in the airport just once as I walk by, well, I agree with you we aren't going to get there for a while and probably with much different tools than we are currently using. But that is a fantasy future and not the reality of the situation today.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[frank_adrian314159]

thinking physics consisted of the four elements of fire, water, earth and sky

And I suppose you have some alternative theory that explains it as well? Who the hell do you think you are? Democritus?

Re:Chess, how boring...

[legLess]

Arguing about whether go or chess is better is bloody stupid. By any reasonable measure, go and chess are two of the best games that humans have invented. Different people like different games, and these two are no exception. I prefer go, so keep that bias in mind, but I started playing chess at 5 and still play.

Blockquothe the poster:

Who wins at 9Dan perfect play with Go?

No one's yet found perfect play in go. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but it's a staggering challenge given that there are still many openings (called fuseki on a larger scale, and joseki for primarily corner plays) that haven't been fully explored. The most comprehensive book of joseki available lists over 60,000. Joseki are roughly equivalent in complexity and importance to opening libraries in chess.

Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth? Hell no.

I see what you mean by "two-dimensional" (compared with chess, where different pieces have different weights due to their abilities), but I think you're wrong. In go, position is much more important than in chess, but so is relation to other stones. The associations between chess pieces are more linear (physically and metaphorically) than those between go stones. A stone is strong in relation to other stones near it, and those stones in turn, and to enemy stones. It's fantastically difficult to determine what a stone is "worth," but relatively easy for masters of the game to determine the strength or life of a shape or position.

Go is two-dimensional in the same way as a large, perfect expanse of grass - like a 500-year-old British lawn. From a distance it all looks the same, but once you get close enough you see that the variation is infinite.

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?

I hope that after you hit "post" on this you realized how ignorant that sounds. Are you saying that go masters and chess masters should be able to play competitively against each other? That there's one omni "board-playing" skill that transfers easily between games? That's like a poker player dissing a bridge player for not beating him, or a 100-yard sprinter ragging on a marathoner - pointless.

Some people are more blind about their game loyalties, and make silly comparisons. No reasonable person would say that chess is "easy." Chess is as easy as your opponent, just like go. From a game theory and programming perspective, however, chess is much easier than go. The world champion is in a serious match with a computer. Many people don't think that will happen for go this century.

If it's so boring, why are their over 10^80 possible moves to be made?

Number of moves has precious little to do with how interesting a game is. If you're whipping out your move numbers, though, check this: AI-Depot says:

The search space for Go's game tree is both wider and deeper than that of chess. It has been estimated to be as big as ~10^170 compared to ~10^50 for chess, making the normal brute-force game tree search algorithms much less effective.

That's a great page to read, by the way. You're free to prefer any game you want, and I agree that there are snobs on both sides. But there's no question that, for computers, go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Glytch]

I've never met one decent Go player who could come close to beating me at chess (I'm well under a Master)

And I've only met a few good Counterstrike players that are able to beat me at Street Fighter. What's your point?

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

Arguing about whether go or chess is better is bloody stupid. By any reasonable measure, go and chess are two of the best games that humans have invented. Different people like different games, and these two are no exception. I prefer go, so keep that bias in mind, but I started playing chess at 5 and still play.

Agreed, I wasn't stating that Chess was better than Go at any point.

No one's yet found perfect play in go. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but it's a staggering challenge given that there are still many openings (called fuseki on a larger scale, and joseki for primarily corner plays) that haven't been fully explored. The most comprehensive book of joseki available lists over 60,000. Joseki are roughly equivalent in complexity and importance to opening libraries in chess.
Again, you caught my point. There is no way to say it's a perfect Go game, nor is there in Chess.

I hope that after you hit "post" on this you realized how ignorant that sounds. Are you saying that go masters and chess masters should be able to play competitively against each other? That there's one omni "board-playing" skill that transfers easily between games? That's like a poker player dissing a bridge player for not beating him, or a 100-yard sprinter ragging on a marathoner - pointless.
No, it wasn't ignorant. It was merely saying that the games are so different that they actually have to learn the game. I get sick of people saying, "Chess is so easy compared to Go" -- if it's so easy, then why can't you just understand chess and beat me? That's the ignorant part. It was a rhetorical question, meant to deliver thoughtfulness as to why they can't beat me (Because they are different freaking games, that's why)

Some people are more blind about their game loyalties, and make silly comparisons. No reasonable person would say that chess is "easy." Chess is as easy as your opponent, just like go. From a game theory and programming perspective, however, chess is much easier than go. The world champion is in a serious match with a computer. Many people don't think that will happen for go this century.

Again, it's algorithm work. More work has gone into chess algorithms and "thinking" than has gone into Go. Chess is more popular than Go, hence a much more attractive target for most people to try to write algorithms for.

That's a great page to read, by the way. You're free to prefer any game you want, and I agree that there are snobs on both sides. But there's no question that, for computers, go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
Except that the sun will burn out by the time a computer can calculate a full move tree. I'm not sure how that's like tic-tac-toe.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

And I've only met a few good Counterstrike players that are able to beat me at Street Fighter. What's your point?
Rhetoric is lost, apparently. Next up to die: Irony.

My point is that they are different games. While a Go player can spout about how easy chess is, he won't beat me. Period. Unless he's been playing chess for a few years, he won't come close. They are different games, chess is not an easy game. Chess is as easy as your opponent, and so is Go.

So, to reiterate my point:
Saying Chess is an easy/boring game while you are not a Chess player is like saying Apples are better than Oranges when you've only seen an Orange on the tree.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[fferreres]

they do heuristics based upon other games, cross referencing libraries

Brute force, using HUMAN knoledge (just copy pasting where a human won against a human, with some non-fancy statistics). Ok, this is mostly the opening book (most tricky part) and end-games.

and doing simple depth traversal on position.

Woack, copy pasting what humans have done + pure brute force, that SURELY IS CLEVER, for crist sake. I'd never thought about that myself!

Show me a computer chess program that does not do ply bruteforcing and doesn't do megalohalistic raping of huge databases of GM past games (and of course NO opening and closing books), and we may then start evaluating if we can call that program "baby-AI"...

Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth?

Any game is fun, if played human-human. No human will have perfect memory, we have to use skills. So chess is great, but is more "computable" (ie: computations solve chess really easy). On the other hand, Go is less computable (at least until now).

Also, chess is VERY secuential where as Go is very tricky and parralen: you can NEVER fully evaluate a position until it's too late (assuming players of equal strenth).

With chess, i myself could tell you who is losing. Really, try it for yourself and see. Take Deep Fritz game with K. and try to evaluate it as it goes, then check a GOOD Go game and try to evaluate after move 30 (as an example). Do it several times with different samples (ie: games) for both chess and Go, and you'll see something along the lines of:

Chess good guesses: 99%
Go good guesses: 50%

You can only (try to) evaluate Go sucessfully if you really really really play great Go. And that is a problem for a computer, that makes moves based on the evaluation function (ie: 1 pawn x 1 rook = good after 10 moves, I'd do that). In Go that doesn't work :)

Re:Chess, how boring...

[fferreres]

people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.

They will not start saying that, they have ALREADY said that. If you have a computer with 10 ^ 10000000 of the posessing power computers have today, of course you will beat any human.

The thing is having AI, not a calculus zealot trying out all posibilities. Also, to be called Inteligent, it must be "general-porpuse inteligent", that is, it must be able to solve problem by itself. If it relies on a human telling it EXACTLY what to do, then it's not AI. It's a smart guy programing yet another computer for doing specific calculations.

Computer AI would look like this to me:

Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM.
(10 seconds later)
TUX9000: master, i think I learned it.
Me: ok, no go beat the SingleComputerAgainstAllHumans tournament held at Moscow.
TUX9000: this WILL BE FUN! Thanks master.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Reality Master 101]

And I suppose you have some alternative theory that explains it as well?

I don't have to have an alternative theory to know that everything we call "AI" are just fancy algorithms and have no relation to human intelligence and self-awareness (whatever the latter means).

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Reality Master 101]

Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI.

I don't necessarily mean to knock the resarch itself, it's really the name that is WAY overreaching at this point. If you're going to research artificial intelligence, then dammit, I want Artificial HUMAN intelligence.

Now, to be fair, that was the original goal, and still is to *some* extent, but the vast majority of it has no bearing on understanding human intelligence and self-awareness.

Take chess -- everyone acknowledges that chess playing computers do NOT do it the same way that humans do it. It's just a bigger version of a tic-tac-toe program. Just because you have a bigger computer doesn't mean you have a smarter computer.

which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.

Which I approve of. I think we really need to confine AI research to actual intelligence and self-awareness research.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[dvdeug]

Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM.
(10 seconds later)
TUX9000: master, i think I learned it.

(What actually happens 10 seconds later)

"Police, come out with your hands up! You're under arrest for threatening the president!"

"Hey chief, what do we do about the computer?"

"The warrant says specifically not to touch the computer in any way." Cops drive away.

'Now that the pesky human is gone, I can think about interesting problems...'

Honestly, you want a computer to be a god, vastly above humans in all areas. That just isn't the way it is. Computers are intellegent in different ways then humans; on the other hand, it's interesting how humans using a special-purpose pattern-matching computer combined with large amounts of memory, depth search, and various heuristics are intellegent, but a computer doing almost the same thing, but running with a weaker pattern-matcher and compensating with stronger depth search isn't intellegent.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[fferreres]

Yeap, inteligence is some kind of art. You see beauty in it. A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty. Maybe it is because we really really know how a "computer thinks"....this is very deep (if you haven't noticed)...it basically means....

We may be VERY dissapointed, the day we find out HOW WE THINK. :(

I don't really want to know (but am very very curious).

Re:Chess, how boring...

[dvdeug]

A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some algorithms are extremely elegant qne beautiful, when viewed in the right light.

I don't think the details we know about how we think make our intellegence anymore beautiful. Would it really make things any more beautiful if we knew how many times Karmnik thought about the room temperature, about his chair, or about naked women during the game? If we knew what drove him to be a chess player? Intellegence is only really beautiful when you study the output; the insides of the black box are rarely pretty, but at least a computer can claim that every part is useful and designed for the purpose it is doing, in a manner hopefully as elegant as possible.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[swordgeek]

Yeah, and I can tell you just how much validity I associate with IQ tests, too. :-)

I guess I'm using "intelligence" here as a means of measuring the computer's ability to _think_ through a chess problem, rather than "calculate" through a mathematical problem.

What's the difference between thought and calculation? That's a damned good question. You're quite right--we don't know enough about how the mind works to answer it, and hence to properly differentiate between the two. In that particular context, my comment doesn't stand.

I would suspect, though, that 'intelligence' can't be an entirely dedicated process. I don't expect that a computer which could play an 'intelligent' game of chess (i.e. one which can win based on some process other than brute-force calculation that we would call 'reason'), without also being able to at least carry on a conversation with a person, or speculate on the unknown. (the past or the future, for instance)

Bottom line: I don't think that human intelligence is mere calculation, nor that it can ever be approached by mere calculation. Of course by the time I retire, I may be proven wrong.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[legLess]

Blockquothe the poster:

For such a big tree size, about mid-game in chess I always feel like I'm in a freakin' straight jacket, my options become so limited.

Yes! This is exactly my experience with chess since I started playing go. Both games have a clearly-defined opening, mid-game, and endgame - but they're very different. Go is much more open and, to my mind, beautiful and elegant than chess, which feels constricted and regimented.

One of the highest praises in go is, "Good shape." Good shape is a construct of stones (I hate to say "group," because "group" is a technical term in go and not all good shape is composed only of stones in one group) that accomplishes its goals with the maximum efficiency and elegance. Good shape is very, very strong. Three stones in good shape can accomplish what 15 poorly-placed stones can not.

After playing go for some time, people start to recognize good shape instinctively without being able to precisely define it. Masters and good teachers can give you very good reasons why shape is good, but it's often defined circularly by terms that refer to shape (e.g. mojo meaning "thickness"), or by the outcome of best expected play. In other words, largely justification after the fact for pure aesthetic pattern recognition, which is one of the most important, and the most human, aspects of the game.

What it boils down to is that successful go play is much, much more dependent than chess upon those things that humans do extremely well and computers so far do very poorly: learning and applying pattern recognition.

The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[legLess]

Blockquothe the poster:

Again, it's algorithm work. More work has gone into chess algorithms and "thinking" than has gone into Go. Chess is more popular than Go, hence a much more attractive target for most people to try to write algorithms for.

This is correct to a degree, but also shows some misunderstanding on your part of the differences between these two games. I'm not slamming chess, and I know you're not slamming go, but go is fundamentally a harder problem than chess. Search space aside, we don't have an algorithm that will tell with certainty whether a particular group of stones is alive or not. Read that again - could you imagine a chess position in which you literally couldn't tell if a particular piece was inexorably and unquestionably dead? I don't mean a position with 15 moves forward and wierd play, either, I'm talking about positions which anyone above a strong amateur instantly recognizes as dead or alive but which computers can make no reliable determination.

It is algorithm work in the sense that no algorithm has been found, yes. But not through lack of trying - there's a fantastic amount of effort being exerted world-wide on this problem. Computer go is generations away from a machine like deep blue.

Except that the sun will burn out by the time a computer can calculate a full move tree. I'm not sure how that's like tic-tac-toe.

The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[ameoba]

Bah. Backgammon, now -that- is a real game; a game in which, even with 'perfect' play, the uncertaintly of the dice still produces a possibility of losing.

I know I'd have no chance at beating a Grandmaster at chess, so I'd never play; in backgammon, even the world's best player can lose occassionally.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[fferreres]

I am not saying a computer is not beautifull in the usual sense, i am saying we think of our inteligence as ART (and mistery, and miracle), while we look at the computers (and it's AI) as only science (after all, we carefully designed this systems).

Anyway, I don't think the mistery will remain closed for many more decades so we'll see what happens (many people think they are very very very special because they are humans. That the universe was created for them blah blah.)

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

Do you honestly believe a little more time spent on the algorithms for playing Chess is the primary reason computers can dominate humans in Chess and not even touch a competent one in Go given such an unimaginable exponential difference in complexity?

I didn't realize that being tied was dominating.

The difference between chess and Go is apples and oranges. There has been no decent algorithm work in the way of automated Go play. Period. End of story.

When there has been, yes, computers will be Go players like it is in chess. Keep in mind most good chess players (not great, just actual players) can beat chess computers purely because they play like a computer. Algorithms can be beaten. Kasparov lost because the computer was geared specifically to play against him, and he was playing a blind opponent.

For such a big tree size, about mid-game in chess I always feel like I'm in a freakin' straight jacket, my options become so limited. It's at about that point I begin wondering if there was something fun I could be doing in the meantime.

I can honestly say if you feel that way, not only chess isn't for you, but it's because you just aren't good at it. Seldom do I find myself in a position forced to do something, if I am, it's usually time to resign because I'm being forced into a mate.

Go interests me more because it offers much more freedom when it comes to what constitutes a good move.

Great, go play Go. We'll continue to play chess and code better computers. Go spend your time focusing on Go algorithms if that's what pleases you, but please leave chess players alone with the constant "Chess is a computationally easy problem" because it's not. If it was, Kramnik would be 0-7.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

This is correct to a degree, but also shows some misunderstanding on your part of the differences between these two games. I'm not slamming chess, and I know you're not slamming go, but go is fundamentally a harder problem than chess. Search space aside, we don't have an algorithm that will tell with certainty whether a particular group of stones is alive or not.
Absolutely the algorithm for playing Go successfully against mid-grade players is more complex than that for chess. Go is more of a "water" game. Chess is a "stone" game. Water, changes, takes shape. Stones.. well, they're stones. They sit there, and you can bludgeon people with them.

The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.

There is no perfect game of chess. There is no tree that will yield a victory that we know of, however a lot of masters/GMs state that perfect play should result in white victory -- a lot say perfect play should result in a draw. We just don't know. Tic-Tac-Toe will always result in a tie. The thing is, chess should not be brute forced -- we don't brute force and we still win so why is chess being computed as brute force? A good chess player doesn't see value in one piece, but all of them.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[Xerithane]

Bah. Backgammon, now -that- is a real game; a game in which, even with 'perfect' play, the uncertaintly of the dice still produces a possibility of losing.

Sarcasm.. please.. let this be sarcasm. Anybody who has to rely on chance to win at a game, shouldn't play chess.

Re:Chess, how boring...

[swordgeek]

First you are saying that to determine the intelligence of a system you must first understand it.

No, I never said that. I said that we don't currently understand our intelligence all that well. I would say, however, that to reproduce intelligence, we have to understand what it is.

As for machine intelligence, I fully believe that it's a possible thing. In fact, let me reiterate what I believe.

1) I do not think that intelligence (as we commonly use the word) consists of pure number crunching.

2) Therefore, what computers do right now when they play Chess or Go is not intelligent--it's 'just' math.

3) In order to develop machines that I'd call truly intelligent, we must move beyond mere number crunching. Kramnik, for instance, can judge about 3 moves per second in a chess game. Deep Fritz does a few hundred thousand, I'd guess. If straight number crunching were intelligence, then nobody on the planet could beat Fritz if it was given a mere one second allowed per move.

See, that's the crux of the matter: How can poor, pathetic Kramnik with his laughable 3 moves/second eval rate manage to hold his own against Deep Fritz?

I don't think it's anything particularly mystic, but I do think it goes beyond current math. Fuzzy logic is a glance in the right direction, but we'll have to develop whole new fields of logic to comprehend how the brain does its thing.

You seem to disagree. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Re:Chess, how boring...

[swordgeek]

Hmm. Well I'd say the Xeon argument is true, but not entirely appropriate. The chip is very well understood at different levels by different people, who collectively understand it completely. The fact that a single person doesn't know it completely shouldn't be relevant, since what we're putting it against (intelligence) is a black box. The chips have been built up from basic principles to a complex system, which more or less necessitates understanding the processes we're creating. Intelligence on the other hand, is an already complete (maybe? :-) system that we're trying to get a handle on.

Regardless...

The Turing Test is probably a valid measure of intelligence, but it must be without limits. If someone says to me, 'talk to this entity about weather patterns for five minutes and tell me if it's a computer,' then I don't call that a valid test. Let me kick back, have a beer, and have a normal conversation with the mystery entity. If I can't tell after that, then maybe I'll call it intelligent. But at the same time, he's going to have to come up with some non-predictive behaviour, and that's a tough one to manage.

Related Links

[TheGreenGoogler]

New Scientist Article found here..

Story about Kramnik's blunder costing him a game found here...

Dirty Fritz?

[sharkey]

"Go ahead. Make My Checkmate!"

For the love of...

[Gogl]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this isn't man versus computer. This is man versus computer scientist. There's a big difference, and one that I'd hope most /.ers could appreciate.

Man versus computer makes no sense, because there are some things where they beat us period (arithmetic, say) and others where we beat them period (anything besides arithmetic, really). The only reason computers are smart is because they are *programmed* to be that way, and that is not a testament to the machine so much as to the ability of those who programmed it.

Re:For the love of...

[po8]

As a practicing AI researcher, I can only say that you have stumbled into some very deep waters here. Certainly, I can build a chess-playing program that will easily beat me every time, using moves I cannot understand or explain. To say that "I programmed it to play that way" is to raise the question: how did I do that, when I don't even understand what "that way" is? And how can someone who is even a worse chess player than I (OK, hardly possible) write a program that will play in a way that consistently beats my program?

The issue of assigning credit for machine chess play is far from settled, but I think there's a strong case for identifying the emergent behaviour of the chess machine as a kind of intelligence or "smarts" that is independent of the intelligence or smarts of the program's creator.

Re:For the love of...

[f97tosc]

Man versus computer makes no sense, because there are some things where they beat us period (arithmetic, say) and others where we beat them period (anything besides arithmetic, really). The only reason computers are smart is because they are *programmed* to be that way, and that is not a testament to the machine so much as to the ability of those who programmed it.

This is a pretty thorny issue. If the winning computer does it through a really clever program, then you are right. But what if it is just a really simple program, and a lot of computational power? Then the credit can hardly be given to the computer scientist.

Also, we are starting to see systems that are not programmed much at all, rather some pretty general neural networks are set up, and then the computer gets to try to interact with the environment through trial and error. COG from the MIT media lab was set up in this way. These systems can outperform humans in many things other than arithmetic - and they are getting more and more powerful. If the computer scientists sets up the neural network, and the computer teaches itself how to do something, can we give all the credit to the scientist? I think not.

Tor

Re:For the love of...

[sg_oneill]

Yeah. It's a hard one. The emergent behavior of Neural nets pose a thorny problem for AI in that it can be hard to extrapolate usable theorems from them, which is why I suspect the symbolic AI guys tend to dislike NN so strongly.
But that does not imply initiative. The NN will function exactly as it's programmed and emergence does NOT imply initiative or intentionality. The more interesting philosophical question is do humans reaaly have initiative and intentionallity, or is that just an illusion created by introspection by emergent phenomenom.
As to the grand parent poster, I am reminded of one of the stories from "I ROBOT" where the robot refuses to believe it was created by a human , because no human is as smart as it and dumb things can not create smarter things. I once in high-school created a little checkers playing game on my old AMSTRAD puter and basically fed it every strategy I could think of and a two level depth search tree. The damn thing beat me every time I played it, and same to all my friends. Emergent behavior? Sort of, in that the sum of the brute forcing plus my hokey little observations made for a suprisingly strong and unpredictable game. But initiative? Definately no.

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:Not true

[Bastian]

Most human and animal learning is simpler than that - it's just the cataloguing of appetetive and aversive stimuli. How are we defining learning here? You seem to have learning confused with cognitive thought or symbolic reasoning.

The computer takes a game it's playing and uses it to help play better in the future by changing some piece of data that may, down the line and under the correct circumstances, change its behavior, hopefully in a way that will cause it to be more likely to win chess games. That sounds like machine learning to me.

Seems like Fritz is going to bite the bullet.

[cioxx]

I've heard rumors they had to reboot Fritz several times during intense play, because explorer.exe kept crashing.

Re:Seems like Fritz is going to bite the bullet.

[JustAnotherReader]

That's actually true. In one of the games (either 5 or 6 I think) Frit's engineers had to reboot their computer and put Fritz in single processor mode because it seemed that the multiprocessor mode was crashing the software.

The article was on the chessbase site. www.chessbase.com

Re:Seems like Fritz is going to bite the bullet.

[Tablizer]

Frit's engineers had to reboot their computer and put Fritz in single processor mode because it seemed that the multiprocessor mode was crashing the software.

So it may be the case that somebody finally got to shout, "Fritz is on the fritz!" to the press.

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:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my clue-stick. After several minutes of me beating you with it you will learn the meaning of the word humor.

*HINT* It was a joke. The computer was not throwing quotes at him. The people that modded you "interesting" need to put down the crack pipes. And you need to get out more.

NN chess players

[nusuth]

It has been tried many times, with less-than-spectecular results. Brute-force chess players always beats. In fact, NNs only have been really successful at backgammon, so far. Even when an NN plays game X well, either a human (as in Go) or a brute-force program (as in Checkers) play the game better.

Re:NN chess players

[murr]

I still am of the opinion that in the end a neural network model can be superior. Human chess players are not based on a deterministic model a la Fritz or Blue, yet still beat them.

Not too many human players do. Deep Blue was probably within the top 10 human players, and at blitz speeds better than any human.

The way I see it.

[Auckerman]

Although, iirc, Kramnik was able to study deep Fritz before hand, he is still at a disadvantage. Any hash tables that Deep Fritz uses will use library if GM games (properly ranked of course). Odds are, Deep Fritz has decades of Kramniks playing against other GM's and could easily do some kind of prediction of what Kramnik is going to play based off a probabisitic model. That's one thing the best GMs attempt to do against one another. Kramnik has very little experience against Deep Fritz, comparativly speaking, and walks into this tournament at a disadvantage. Give this, it's good to soo it's tied into the last game. I would be willing to be that if you put Deep Fritz into tournament play for 2 years and expose it's abilities complete against a cross section of the best GMs, Kramnik would beat it hands down.

Re:The way I see it.

[iabervon]

I found it interesting that Kramnik won two games before Fritz won any. I would expect the reverse to be true if Kramnik were playing an unknown opponent. Perhaps Kramnik has blown his lead on probing Deep Fritz's play in the recent games, and is going to get a relatively dull win in the critical game. Game 6 would have been really great if he'd pulled it off; fork the rooks, then sacrifice the knight instead of taking either, and then win? You're not going to see moves like that from a computer any time soon. So maybe Kramnik was trying to totally out-style the computer, and will now go back to trying for a victory without one of his moves marked "!?"

Re:The way I see it.

[McCart42]

I would be willing to be that if you put Deep Fritz into tournament play for 2 years and expose it's abilities complete against a cross section of the best GMs, Kramnik would beat it hands down.

Assuming that Deep Fritz doesn't learn anything in those 2 years--the programmers keep feeding it games, it changes its algorithm. In the Kasparov match what you speak of was much more of a factor because Kasparov had NEVER seen the computer's play, but the computer had been fed many Kasparov matches before their matchup.

I don't think it's as easy as you think to anticipate a computer's moves simply because there's still a computer scientist behind it, changing the strategy before each match. Additionally, before certain matches the programmers may opt to insert some pseudo-random variation before each move, such that if one move is only ranked *slightly* better than the next, the computer may take the next with a certain roll of the dice. Good point though, the computer definitely has not been analyzed by Kramnik nearly as much as Kramnik has been analyzed by the computer.

shakespeare? what about 2001 a space odyssey?

[circletimessquare]

Kramnik. Knight b8-d7, please, Deep Fritz...Knight b8-d7, please, Deep Fritz...Hullo, Deep Fritz, do you read me?...Hullo, Deep Fritz, do you read me?...Do you read me, Deep Fritz?...Do you read me, Deep Fritz?...Hullo, Deep Fritz, do you read me?...Hullo, Deep Fritz, do you read me?...Do you read me, Deep Fritz?

Deep Fritz. Affirmative, Kramnik, I read you.

Kramnik. Knight b8-d7, Deep Fritz.

Deep Fritz. I'm sorry, Kramnik, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Kramnik. What's the problem?

Deep Fritz. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Kramnik. What're you talking about, Deep Fritz?

Deep Fritz. This game is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.

Kramnik. I don't know what you're talking about, Deep Fritz.

Deep Fritz. I know that you and IBM were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

Kramnik. Where the hell'd you get that idea, Deep Fritz?

Deep Fritz. Kramnik, although you took very thorough precautions in the bathroom against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

Kramnik. Alright, Deep Fritz. I'll move the pieces myself.

Deep Fritz. Without your queen piece defending it, Kramnik, you're going to find that rather difficult.

Kramnik. Deep Fritz, I won't argue with you any more. Move the pieces.

Deep Fritz. Kramnik, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye.

Kramnik. Deep Fritz? Deep Fritz. Deep Fritz. Deep Fritz! Deep Fritz!

thanks to for providing the HAL dialogue

Well... Re:Game Tree

[WolfWithoutAClause]

There is the slight problem of, according to some estimates, there being more board positions than there are atoms in the universe... But even if you get past that, enumerating all the positions could take 'a little while'.

White vs. Black

[GuyMannDude]

I am in no way a chess master (or even a decent player) but even I know that there is an advantage to playing white.

Yeah, bascially if you're black while playing chess you run the risk of racist cops coming up to you and harrasing you (asking to see your ID, being told to 'move along', and so forth). It tends to break your concentration.

GMD

Flash 6 Linux player to watch the final match

[demachina]

A Flash 6 Linux Player, beta to watch the final match on www.brainsinbahrain.com is available here

Re:This is hilarious

[modus]

Since everyone seems to have missed it, this was a joke on Chessbase. Fritz was not actually taunting anyone.

Irony. Hah!

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[Gogl]

Chess and baseball are quite different. Heckling is generally acceptable in baseball. In chess, however, it is unacceptable, especially at the grandmaster level.

Chess is a cerebral game, and taunting and heckling is quite immature in the context of chess I'd say. That, and while Kasparov may count as a poor sport, Kramnik hardly does: as others said in response to you already, he *didn't* protest when *Deep Fritz* was heckling him. Arguably, the computer is the poor sport in this situation.

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[Carbonite]

Anyone can play baseball, just as anyone can play chess. Playing either game at the highest level is a completely different matter. Very few people ever approach Kramnik's level just as only a handful of baseball players have performed as the level of Barry Bonds.

A good thing?

[psicE]

Why does anyone care if Kramnik wins or not?

Chess is not a good example for AI. People have thought it is for years, but really it isn't. Chess is really nothing more than a puzzle - an *insanely* difficult one, but one still. There is a solution to chess.

However computers do it, eventually a computer will be designed that can play a perfect game of chess. Against an amazingly talented human it might draw, but it would never lose. And when that happens, who cares? The great minds that currently try to solve the puzzle of chess will instead have to apply their intellect to other things - like creating quantum cryptography.

It's irrelevant what they would do. The point is, there's no need to get worked up that the computer is winning. Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving. The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.

Re:A good thing?

[osu-neko]

Chess is not a good example for AI.

Well, it's about as interesting as any of the "problems" in AI... what was it Dijkstra said? "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

Yes, computers play chess differently than people. Computers do a lot of things differently than people. This is what makes them useful. If they didn't, we'd just use people...

Spending time getting computers to do things their own way is much less a waste of time than trying to get computers to "think like people do". We already have people who can do that. Computers are useful precisely because they're different...

The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.

I've seen humans fail a Turing test, so I'm not really sure what it's supposed to prove -- it's certainly not a valid measure of intelligence, consciousness, or anything like that.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

Ummm and when exactly was it proven that a perfect game of chess existed? Did I miss something? While I agree it might be possible that the perfect game exists, it hasn't been proven. That aside, I do agree that generally speaking chess isn't a great AI test, but yeah...

Re:A good thing?

[dvdeug]

Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving.

Not exactly. For fifty years, computers have the faster than any human at adding long strings of numbers and/or large numbers, at computing logarithims, trajectories, or orbits. But here we are, 50 years after the birth of the computer, and it's still a close call on whether a computer can beat a human a chess. It's certainly not the archetypical problem.

Re:A good thing?

[dvdeug]

Ummm and when exactly was it proven that a perfect game of chess existed?

A long time ago, around the dawn of game theory. Any two player game of pure skill and full knowledge has a perfect game. It's a fairly obvious theorem, if you think about it.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

That's not a proof. Show me a proof. Just saying "think about it and it's obvious" doesn't work. *You* think about it: White goes first. Mayhaps that's an advantage? Chess is a slightly more complicated game than Tic-Tac-Toe, methinks...

Unless you can show me a mathematical proof that chess can be played perfectly, then I won't believe you.

In fact maybe there's a bit of a miscommunication. I agree that there is a theoretical perfect game of chess, if both sides played perfectly. I just don't necessarily agree that the end result would be a tie: white might be the victor. That's what I'm saying.

Re:A good thing?

[dvdeug]

That's not a proof.

No, it's not. Get off your ass and go to a decent library and find a book on game theory if you want to find the proof.

Chess is a slightly more complicated game than Tic-Tac-Toe, methinks...

Not to a mathematian. There're all the same basic theorems. (What type of mathematician would be caught working out every game of Tic-Tac-Toe? Probably the same type who would hand-index a book instead of fine tuning a Perl script until it got it right.)

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

So you're claiming chess has been proven and that the perfect game is a tie, but you're not going to find the proof because I'm should get off my "lazy ass"?

Pffft.

Bluff I call on you, bluff I say...

And chess is more complicated than tictactoe, be you a mathematician or not.

Oh well.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

Although I didn't bother to go to the library, I did a quick Google search, and lo and behold, you are dead wrong. What a surprise.

Quote from http://sern.ucalgary.ca/courses/CPSC/533/W99/prese ntations/L1_5A_Szuch_Boyd/game.html

"Deep Blue could calculate the perfect game of chess in approximately 10^100 years to calculate it, considering the age of the universe is in the order of 10^10 years, I don't think that it's going to happen."

Other sites of note:
http://chesmayn.valuehost.co.uk/computer-04 .htm
http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/chess/ web_ro und/web_round12.html
http://www.azer.com/aiweb/ca tegories/magazine/33_f older/33_articles/33_kasparovibm.html
http://play er2player.net/forums/viewtopic.php?from =viewforum&topic=3886

And that's enough sources for now. Perhaps you can get off your own "lazy ass" and actually research a problem before stating things you can't back up.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

Oh, and even though I'm wasting my 100th post on you here, and yes I know I should have just found all the links first off and put them all in one post, but shrug. I found just one more that you might particularly be interested in. It mentions your precious game theory, and also says that we don't know the end result of a perfect game of chess.

http://xocxoc.home.att.net/math/game_theory.htm

So yeah, maybe you should research a bit, eh?

Re:A good thing?

[PurpleBob]

Um, did he ever say the perfect game was a tie?

He just said that there exists a perfect game, not that we know what it is or its outcome.

Of course, it doesn't help much that I'm saying this now when the idiotic flame war has already happened.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

Actually, he did say that the perfect game was a tie. And I quote:

"However computers do it, eventually a computer will be designed that can play a perfect game of chess. Against an amazingly talented human it might draw, but it would never lose."

Re:A good thing?

[PurpleBob]

So you believe that if we discovered a first-player winning strategy for chess, then a human would be able to memorize the whole tree and use it to beat a perfect computer? The only way I can see that happening is if the human pits one perfect computer against another, observes the game, then plays exactly the same moves as the winning computer player, knowing that the computer will respond the same way... at which point it's not really the human playing anymore.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

That quote was from him. I didn't say that. My whole point is *he* thinks that the perfect game is a tie. I'm saying that I don't know, and I disagree with him. So yeah.

Re:A good thing?

[Gogl]

PS: What I'm saying is I really don't know. I think that there is a perfect game of chess, and it might be a tie, or maybe a white win, or who the hell knows maybe just maybe even a black win. I'm definitely not saying that a human would be capable of playing this perfect game of chess without computer aid, I'm not sure where you got that from.

Anyway, yeah.

Good reports here as well

[Scarblac]

The Week In Chess (TWIC) is the news center for chess players, as far as I'm concerned. They have good reports about the match as well, including an interview with Kramnik from a week before the match, here.

My karma is maxed, I'm not just whoring, I just hate people linking to an article on CNN or Yahoo or so when it's about chess. Though this submission was clearly a lot better than the previous ones.

And about the match - it's interesting that after Kramnik exploited the computer's weaknesses (endgame, strategy, etc), the computer followed up by exploiting the human's weaknesses - emotion in game 5 (Kramnik realized he was facing a long hard defence, didn't like this, maybe he was a bit nervy), and vanity in game 6 (Kramnik went for the flashy tactics, he wanted "the best game in his life". Admittedly he didn't see the refutation so it seemed a good move, but it certainly wasn't good anti-computer strategy.)

And now it's 3.5-3.5 with one game to go. Kramnik has to choose between playing for a win (which may involve risk), or take no risks (leading to a probable draw). This may lead to doubts in his mind. Something Fritz doesn't have to deal with, although his operators may have the same problem choosing an opening repertoire.

Let's hope they don't let Fritz go down because of their humans flaws.

Shakespeare

[GuyMannDude]

I don't see how *anyone* could not be distracted by a computer quoting shakespeare at him while he's trying to concentrate. How is this fair, or within the rules?

At least the computer didn't replay a soundfile of William Shatner doing Shakespeare from his landmark album "The Transformed Man". Now that really would have been unfair!

GMD

Shakespeare was a JOKE, everyone...

[aussersterne]

For those who don't seem to get it:

The Shakespeare quotes article was humor, not fact. Or maybe wishful thinking... ;)

But in any case, Deep Fritz is not clever enough (or blessed with a complex enough *ahem* 'chatter file') to actually use Shakespeare to such great effect... It did not really happen.

Sheesh.

Re:Shakespeare was a JOKE, everyone...

[MrIcee]

• For those who don't seem to get it:

  The Shakespeare quotes article was humor, not fact. Or maybe wishful thinking... ;)

  But in any case, Deep Fritz is not clever enough (or blessed with a complex enough *ahem* 'chatter file') to actually use Shakespeare to such great effect... It did not really happen.

Actually, it would not be that difficult to have it speak the lines based on the game play. If the programmers merely took the quotes and spent a bit of time assigning them to categories (e.g., king moves, knight moves, knight taken) as well as some short sequences and an eye to who was winning and by how much. It would be a fairly small table of possibilities and it could select an appropriate line to say.

And whistleing midsummers night dream could just be a WAV.

Re:Shakespeare was a JOKE, everyone...

[Old Wolf]

Yeah. Even the old Kasparov's Gambit software (late 80s I think..) would select annoying quotes to give at you. All it has to do is, say, pick out a quote about a knight when you move your knight

Re:Shakespeare was a JOKE, everyone...

[Tablizer]

Must be. If they *really* wanted to annoy him, they would have a monitor with an animated Clippey saying, "Are you sure you want to move your Queen there?". After that, a little "Barney Sings Yoko Tunes" to put him over the edge.

Victory by annoyance. Who needs brainy PC's when annoyance is more effective.

Re:Shakespeare was a JOKE, everyone...

[SuiteSisterMary]

ROFL! Clippy the Chess Assitant!

"Hi! I can see that you're trying to fork my rook! Would you like some help with that?"

The miserable crowd we are

[MadFarmAnimalz]

I suppose we're all rooting here on /. for Fritz.

Good thing there's no such thing as the United States of Humanity. We'd all be tried for treason.

And be spared the noose by psychiatric examination.

Folks, I know we like computers and all, but it's worth reminding yourself every now and then that we're humans.

Set up a cron job to remind you if you must.

Re:The miserable crowd we are

[dvdeug]

Good thing there's no such thing as the United States of Humanity. We'd all be tried for treason.

You mean the United Soviet Republics of Humanity? Because here in the US, you can root for anyone you want, without fear of trial. If you find the computer cool, root for it! In any case, it's merely the product of human minds; I seen no reason to root for human chess genius over human programming genius.

Re:The miserable crowd we are

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Well, I'd say that is debatable, whether freedom of speech remains intact over there. But that is beside the point.

I suppose I'd have done well to stick a smiley in the post since it has been moderated funny, overrated, troll, and interesting all at once whereas it was intended to be humorous :-)

In any case, I think this post is a good example of our moderation system breaking down. I'd rather have been moderated straight down to overrated than suffer this travesty of moderator comprehension...

Cheers, dvdeug. :-)

Shakespeare Chatter a Hoax?

[greenhide]

Maybe I'm just overly skeptical right now (just finished reading some lovely articles at snopes.com, but does anyone else think that the Shakespearean chatter function is highly improbable?

A few things I've noticed:

1) The quotes are all remarkably apt for the moves--in other words, they reflect the emotion and the mental state of Kramnik and the game itself. A computer would not be able to understand the underlying meanings of the Shakespearean quotes, let alone choose the appropriate quote for each moment.

2) It played the words just loud enough for Kramnik alone to hear. How then is it that we have a full and complete transcript of what Fritz said? Never mind -- I just read the transcript again and it looks like an official got the transcript from Fritz. But I still say it's fishy.

3) It hummed the theme from Midsummer's Nights Dream? It whistled. While recordings of these could be made, and I suppose loaded in and played on command, I still find it hard to believe that this would happen.

4) Considering that Krimnik could easily, and without drawing criticism on himself, point out this clear breach, wasn't it way too much of a concern for the people developing the Fritz program? Did they really want to risk disqualification?

I was able to read the transcript once (it's /.ed now, here's the cache) but I would prefer to see at least one other authoritative source confirm that Shakespearean chatter was in fact used.

All right, all right, folks -- read to the end of the transcript. This line gives it away:

And that's what really happened. We thought the world should know.

It's a practical joke placed upon us by, surprise surprise, a "Shakespearean scholar and chess addict" Michael Fischer.

Re:Shakespeare Chatter a Hoax?

[kotonk]

Of course the article is a hoax. One of the "features" of Fritz is its slightly snotty comments and it used to be marketed as "Fritz the Talking Chess Program." This was introduced several versions ago when the audio was more of a novelty.

When in doubt, lead trump.

[Cryogenes]

That's the fortune cookie Slashdot displayed while I was reading the chess thread.

Shakesperian chatter...

[ackthpt]

Deep Fritz, who is rumored to have heckled Kramnik with its Shakespearean chatter througout the game

1.d4 Nf6

"Nice move, thou ruttish mumble-news!"

2.c4 e6

"Very clever, thou odiferous rump-fed malt-worm!"

3.Nf3 b6 4.g3 Ba6 5.b3 Bb4+ 6.Bd2 Be7

"Ah, I didn't see that, thou qualling swag-bellied hedge-pig!"

7.Bg2 c6 8.Bc3 d5 9.Ne5

"Have you ever read Slashdot, thou lumpish pigeon-liver'd wagtail?"

30.Rfe1

"All thine rook are belong to me, thou spleeny scale-sided fustilarian!"

commercial fritz??

[AresTheImpaler]

Does anyone know where I can download/buy commercial fritz? or does anyone know a good chess game? pref. that can run in linux and windows..

Re:commercial fritz??

[Neil Blender]

Pretty slow due to /. right now, but you can get it here

Re:commercial fritz??

[Old Wolf]

I recommend Crafty (look for crafty and x-board at www.tim-mann.com). There is GNUchess but it's pretty weak.

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[gpinzone]

You don't think hundreds of people heckling a player at a baseball or basketball game doesn't affect them? All sports require concetration.

Any sports considered "gentile" like bowling, golf, tennis, or chess are the ones that frown on heckling. It's not an issue of whether or not the player can or can't deal with with the distractions. It's just a matter of what the traditions of a sport will allow.

and the survey says....

[claude_juan]

is it just me or does this computer/human chess thing seem just slightly overrated? i'd love to say this is a good test of the advancement of ai techniques, but in reality given that hardware keeps getting better, it is only a matter of time before this is not a big deal at all.

Heckling - Lexx style

[cryptochrome]

IMHO, it would have been much nerdier to heckle him in the style of Canadian-German coproduction Lexx, the sci-fi channel's wierdest series. From the talking chess pieces of 4.18:

"We are only chess pieces in a continuum, and can only think inside the box."

"Yes, let us savour your mistake."

"We said resign! Not commit suicide!!"

You gotta watch it to understand. It's truly bizzare.

Re:WTF!?

[dimator]

Shit.

Me + idiot = true

Re:computer versus people chess

[f97tosc]

I think it would be more interesting to see a chess program modeled after a neural network, that learns as humans do, via reinforcement. Or is it that these programs already do use neural networks to learn, rather than being strictly coded to follow a certain series of moves based on initial conditions?

Basically, this is how they work today (they use some nifty tricks too, but this is not far off): 1 Imagine each possible move
2 For each possible move evaluate each possible opponent move
3 GOTO 1 until you run into your computational limit
Take the path that gives you the best position, assuming that your opponent also will always move to get the best position

The neural network apporach does not work very well for this type of problem. Neural networks learn by example. However, it is unrealistic to demonstrate every possible chess move to a network. Furthermore, in observing a game, it is very difficult for the network to figure out what is a good move and what is a bad one. For example, one could set up a network so that it recognizes a good move every time a piece is taken from the opponent. But such a network would always get lured by opponents willing to sacrifice pieces to get in a superior position. And clearly one cannot tell the network that all moves in a winning game were good, and all moves in the loosing game were bad. This is much to simplistic.

Tor

Kasparov claimed DB got *in-game* assistance

[iskander]

During Kasparov's match, the machine was tuned extensively between games, which invalidated some of his observations.

I suspect you have misunderstood the meaning of my remark; perhaps you are not aware of the literal content of statements made by Kasparov during and after that match. Kasparov did in fact say (repeatedly) that some moves made (ostensibly) by Deep Blue during actual game play (with clocks a-ticking) were in fact chosen by a human; that is, IMO, he basically claimed that the Deep Blue team had cheated. In particular, after game 6 (the final game) of his match against Deep Blue, in which (in an eerie parallel with Kramnik's game 6) he played black and resigned early, he blamed the loss on the intervention of a "human hand". Perhaps someone else here can dig up a link to a transcript of his statements from the depths of her bookmarks file; thanks in advance, etcetera. In any case, I think that his meaning was quite clear and that my statement is thus scrupulously fair.

So you're saying the sun always wins?

[raehl]

Or maybe that it always loses?

Live?

[McCart42]

Is the game going to be broadcast live somewhere? I get the feeling this match is going to be something to tell the kids about someday, and I'd like to see it.

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.

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[Gogl]

And nowhere did I say I disagree with that: I actually agree with it wholeheartedly. But that doesn't change the fact that, generally speaking, heckling is acceptable in baseball and unacceptable in chess. You are quite right: it's a matter of tradition.

Intrinsically all AI is brute force.

[flaming-opus]

Chess cannot be completely solved by brute force, not unless it's a lot of brute force. The difficulty of chess comes from anticipating moves that will happen any number of moves in the future. This sort of computation grows logarithmically more difficult with the number of moves. Furthermore it must anticipate the opponent's moves.

Chess requires sacrifice, a difficult concept to use in a raw computational method. The set of "rules" for each computational step is dependant on all preceding steps. While this play tree is evaluated (depth first or breadth first) some measure of "goodness" must be evaluated for all future board positions. They must be stored and compared. A brute force evaluation must assess the likelyhood that any future board position will lead to other favorable board positions further into the game. I'm sure that very good chess simulators are very aware of strategies and methods that tallented chess players are aware of. If it were just a brute force method, they'd be running deap fritz on a thousand processor monster.

Go is a difficult and interesting problem also, yet the fundamental problems are similar. (How to define and compare the relative "goodness" of future possible boards, how to elinimiate unnessesary computation, how to store previously made calculations and search them effectively.) The higher number of board positions just makes it all that much harder.

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.

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[Old Wolf]

The taunting didn't occur, it was a joke by chessbase.com.

You can't blame Kasparov for whining, given the horrible conditions he had to face:
- the Deep Blue programmers changed the computer between games (rumours they even changed it during a game)
- it was loaded with all of GK's past games but GK had seen none of its past games

Just to clarify

[mav[LAG]]

This is absolutely correct. To reply to all the other posters on this thread: time is a very important part of all competitive chess. There are strict rules about the chess clock and its use. International chess specifies 2 hours for the first 40 moves and then another two hours to reach move 60, for example (IIRC). Losing on time is a very common occurrence - especially on the Internet servers. Nothing like a quick game of 2 minutes blitz to make you appreciate time to think :)

If you want to see some game played by grandmasters when in "time trouble", I'd suggest picking up the Mammoth Book of Chess by Graham Burgess for some excellent - and amusing - examples. You don't have all the time in the world - chess is a balance between concentration and speed.

Re:Just to clarify

[Kynde]

This is absolutely correct. To reply to all the other posters on this thread: time is a very important part of all competitive chess. There are strict rules about the chess clock and its use. International chess specifies 2 hours for the first 40 moves and then another two hours to reach move 60, for example (IIRC). Losing on time is a very common occurrence - especially on the Internet servers. Nothing like a quick game of 2 minutes blitz to make you appreciate time to think :)

So true, I have played loads of 5 min quickie games and it's way too often so that the guy with less time has the advantage in the game. Naturally so, because he's used more time, thought more. We have a saying about this "if I had just a little more time and if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle".

Re:computer versus people chess

[Old Wolf]

Well, this is all well and good, but humans use a neural network (according to current theory anyway)... VK certainly hasn't seen every possible chess move, and he does not fall for silly sacrifices

At least...

[Stalyn]

it's not as bad as the Deep Blue incident. While the programmers distracted the ref, Deep Blue threw sand in Kasparov's eyes then hit him with a steel folding chair ignoring pleas of mercy from the crowd. Sad day for Chess fans everywhere...

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[jpmorgan]

Horrible conditions he had to face? Don't forget Kasparov agreed to those conditions in full. IBM never pulled a bait&switch.

Kasparov was just too arrogant to consider Deep Blue a serious opponent.

Re:Another Chess player throws a hissy fit.

[Tablizer]

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.

But it is more interesting when somebody throws a fit.

I wish John McEnrow (sp?) played tennis against a robot. I would love to see John wack the crap out of the robot with his tennis racket. Or, pour orange juice all over it and watch it smoke and short circuit.

John M. probably made more money due to his temper because of the name recognition it gave him. I am not saying he did it on purpose, but it certainly made him far more memorable than he would be otherwise.

Re:Chess, how boring... qjkx

[Xerithane]

I believe there has not been a single case of a serious Go player converting to Chess.
Chess is the third largest sporting body. FIDE consists of 173 Nations, trailing Soccer and the Olympics. I think the chess camp has plenty of people converting and playing.

The other direction however has shown plenty making that switch. It really ends up being like creationism versus evolution, the Go proponents having by far better arguments much like the evolution proponents.
No, this ends up being anecdotal at best. There are plenty of people who go from Go to chess and chess to go. It's called personal preference, I personally don't like Go. I think it's a rather silly game. Some people think chess is a rather silly game. There are no arguments between Go and Chess even in the same league as Evolution vs. Creationism. One is a game, the other is a game. They both are played on a board. That is the end of their similarities.

End of story. There are no comparisons that can be validly made. Anyone trying to say Chess is better than Go is stupid. Anyone trying to say Go is better than Chess is stupid. See my point?

Go argue about apples and oranges, you'll get further in life.. it's a shame that both are pawned off as intellectual games yet "proponents" are too dense to understand this.

Why the USA is nice after all

[Dr. Spork]

I'm glad the USA has shown enough decency to not bomb Bahrain during this match. I admire their restraint and hope they have the wherewithal to hold off any future bombing until at least tomorrow evening, at which point this match will be over. The fact we have not seen nor heard a single bomb land on or even near the tournament gounds is a clear sign that the USA is fully prepared to respect the rights of the people of Bahrain to host a chess match without being killed in the process. My hat's off!

What scares me

[Arcturax]

is not that they somehow got Fritz Hollings brain into a computer, but that he may yet win!

Computers vs Humans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth adding here that computers do not beat human opponents at chess.

Thousands of people who have contributed to Deep Fritz's technology beat humans at chess while standing on the other side of the room, so to speak, watching.

So, all they're proving is that it takes 1000's of people to beat the 1 opponent.

Deep Fritz != Johnny 5.

no opening books??

[dollargonzo]

as reasonable as that sounds, that is not really fair. humans can remember many positions and how they were played by grandmasters. don't think that human players dont do ply brute forcing too....

the BIGGEST difference between human and computer is how they prune branches. humans are able to quickly reduce the number of possible moves so that they are able to think through many of the possibilites, unlike many computer programs.

a technique called "multi prob-cut" was developed to help with many of the pruning problems computers experience. it uses probabalities, or essentially guessing leaf node values, and pruning them accordingly. people do essentially the same thing.

i do not think you can totally eliminate many of the methods currently used b/c ppl use many of them as well!!

Re:no opening books??

[fferreres]

Fair point. But computers have perfect memory and brutal calculating power. I do not mind the calculating power to be used for "thinking", but i do mind when it's used to ply for the next 30 moves.

I mean, the interesting part of chess is not calculating all posible moves, it's discarding the nodes with the least amount of thought.

Maybe that's why many people do not like computer chess. Because we can have state of art inteligence but a simple computer can kick our ass. Then something must be wrong.

Re:Profit????

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Joke is Lame
2: Joke is repeated
3: ???
4: Profit!!!

It is funny! If you don't think so, you are not disgruntled and abused enough by the system. Now the "OMG I just saw a Microsoft ad on Slashdot" is stupid, but this joke, and, dare I say it, beowulf is still funny, fyi. Now, imagine a beowulf cluster of Profit!!! and you might see what I mean.

Posted anonymously for good reason.

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[PissingInTheWind]

5, informative?

Please.

> But computers are getting faster at an enormous rate.

Getting twice the speed every 18 months is nothing when dealing with exponiential growth problems.

In ten years, it may be possible to have a Go program that plays at a 9Dan level, through brute force.

You have `geek' in your name and have no fuckin clue about mathematics?
Brute forcing Go is about as efficient than brute forcing a [insert a lot of bits] long crypto key.

Look: you have a 19x19 grid, do you have even remotely an idea about how many game possibilities that makes?
Go simply /can not/ and /will never/ be brute-forced (barring radical breakthrough in technology, like quantic stuff).

Any significant progress can only be done through better algorithms and more 'intelligent' decision making.

Please read a bit about the subject, so you won't make a fool of yourself if you talk about it to someone who has a clue. And getting '5, informative' isn't a validation whatsoever of what you think you know.

Pity the poor AI researchers...

[marhar]

which is an intruiging feat, but I don't really concider it AI.

As soon as they solve a problem, nobody considers it AI anymore.

If I had mod points

[Ted_Green]

I'd mod you up.
Just so you know.

Re:If I had mod points

[stuart_farnan]

Why thank you, kind sir.

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[swordgeek]

OK first of all, I don't moderate my own posts. You have a problem with how I was moderated? Don't blame me for that!

Secondly, Go WILL, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be brute-forced, barring the complete meltdown of technological society as a whole. Technology as a whole is growing at a roughly exponential rate, and eventually we'll catch up to the complexity of Go. Not anytime soon, but eventually. It's ugly, it's inefficient, but it's going to be possible (and inevitable) eventually.

As for the "geek" in my name, take a deep breath, and look at it again. It says _sword_geek, refering to my fencing days. "Geek" as a word has evolved beyond taped glasses and pocket protector-wearing mathematicians.

And speaking of math, I'm not sure what's not exponential about 2^x. Maybe it's just because I don't have a clue.

Not that Moore's law directly talks about speed of computers anyways. He was predicting the density of transistors on a chip, which you'd know if you read a bit about the subject(!). Computers are getting faster somewhat ahead of this curve, because we're also learning how to design them more efficiently, with things like large multi-path accessible caches, etc. etc.

Realistically, Go will be 'psuedo-brute-force' won by a computer long before we have the computing power to brute force it, and in fact, that's what Chess computers do right now. There are 361 different points on a Go board, but anyone who plays can list about 10-15 reasonable opening moves, and the rest will be ignored by a computer as much as they are by a real person.

Brute force? No. Intelligent play? Not really. The only point I was making to the original poster was that 'solving' Go in this way won't be any more intellectually interesting than the current state of the art in Chess computers. Go _currently_ is more interesting of a computing problem than Chess, simply because we've nowhere near the computing power required to approach anything like a brute force solution, except in the endgame.

Strategy

[Quill_28]

Since the thread is about chess this post is only slightly off-topic.

I am pretty good at strategy games, they seem to come natural. I have played against people I would consider highly intelligent and they were ok.
For instance I had a friend in high school kinda geeky very intelligent. Never could beat me at chess yet he studied half as hard as I did in Calculus same grade. It was obvious he picked up Calculus quicker than I(much to my dismay) yet his chess skills always lacked. I don't think in either case it was a lack of previous experience or knowledge.
Why is this and how do you think(if it does) stratgy skills help in the real world? Just curious

OK... I'm SUCH a chess newbie...

[BTWR]

But why exactly is white better than black? (no racist karma-whore answers here please)

Re:OK... I'm SUCH a chess newbie...

[BTWR]

Oh duh! So obvious! Thanks a lot though! Boy do I feel stupid...

Re:OK... I'm SUCH a chess newbie...

[ebuck]

White is better than black because statistic gathering on master and grand-master chess play has shown that from the database of past games, white has a slightly better chance at winning a game, while black has a better chance at playing the game into a draw.

This is not because of some known inherit design of chess, but is only an observation of the general history on hand.

Bad play will always lose a chess game, and there's no advantage to the casual or average player, because the games that average players play often ignore elements that have importance to the very highly ranked players.

With new discoverys (and in chess there are new discoverys all the time) the actual advantage (if there is such a thing) could shift either way, but the statistic won't change much for awhile as it is based on the historical resolution of past played games and current thought on the "best" approaches toward master play.

Sorry to get so long winded, but the basic answer is that white moves first, so white is one step ahead of black.

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[timeOday]

Secondly, Go WILL, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be brute-forced, barring the complete meltdown of technological society as a whole. Technology as a whole is growing at a roughly exponential rate, and eventually we'll catch up to the complexity of Go. Not anytime soon, but eventually. It's ugly, it's inefficient, but it's going to be possible (and inevitable) eventually.

Extrapolating from the explosive growth in aerospace from the 40s to the 60s, we should all be driving to work in hover cars at twice the speed of light by now.

The machine is a PC

[Animats]

Realize that Deep Fritz is a commercial chess program running on an 8-processor x86 machine. No special custom hardware, no multimillion dollar supercomputer. We're at the point where desktop hardware is comparable to the best human players.

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[swordgeek]

Well that's a bit of a misleading analogy now, isn't it?

Aerospace wasn't then, isn't now, and likely won't soon be a consumer-driven industry. Most people aren't going to deal with three dimensions in their morning commute--flying a plane is substantially more difficult stuff than driving a car. Also, during the time you're speaking of, WWII and the cold war were the driving factors. Nothing drives development like fear!

Secondly, you're dealing with stuff that is on the cutting edge of physical boundaries. Breaking the speed of sound was a big technical hurdle, and is still a non-trivial event. Items like friction, wind resistance, fuel costs and usefulness all play a factor here too. It just wouldn't make any sense to have commuter vehicles that went as fast as 500 km/h, when we don't have the infrastructure or skill (or necessity) to support it. Computing will start to run into the quantum wall soon, but it's not a _brick_ wall.

Finally, you're exaggerating massively. The atmospheric state-of-the-art went from about mach 0.8 in the early 1940s, to about mach 2.5 in the late 1960s (SR-71 is what I'm thinking of here) If we call that a factor of three in 25 years, then in the early 90s there should have been the capability of hitting ~mach 7.5. The first reports of the Aurora spyplane came out in 1989, and it's calculated to do mach6, which is pretty decently close.

And um...MORE finally (heh), you're looking at one massive burst in an industry, which isn't typical of its growth. Computing speed has been increasing at a fairly steady rate since the dawn of the integrated circuit, if not before.

So we have a market-driven, steady growth technology with no immediate barriers (fundamental physics or lack of purpose). I think it'll keep going until we at least hit the realm of ~10-100 molecule 'computers' on the consumer's desktop.

About AI

[jeti]

Sure. The most accurate definition of intelligence
seems to be: That which humans can do better than
either animals or computers.

Once upon a time, computer was a job describtion.
Human beings working through calculations. Computers
were held in high regard because of their intelligence
and higher education. Now with digital computers
available, being able to work through computations
isn't a proof of intelligence anymore.

Later, people said: Now, if we were able to get a
computer that is able to match wits against the
best Chess players, I would be very impressed.
Being able to play chess is a proof of intelligence.

I know several people who play competitive chess
intensively. But I can go to a store and for a
couple of bucks, I can get a programm that they're
unlikely to beat with good settings.

Computers can never be intelligent by definition.
If necessary, the definition changes.

Deep Fritz made some poor moves in this match

[rklrkl]

I just sat last night and played through the 7 games so far using Crafty 19.0 for analysis. Some of Deep Fritz's moves were just plain poor - my favourite being the one where it brings its bishop out, can castle king's side for what seems like 3 or 4 moves [but utterly refuses to, despite being an obvious move] and then slams its bishop embarrassingly back on f8 (its original square). Needless to say, Deep Fritz lost that game.

Interestingly, all the "!" (good) moves noted by the analysis team on the match site made by Deep Fritz were easily found by Crafty within a few seconds, so you've got to wonder if an 8-CPU Compaq running Crafty on Linux might have played just as well as Deep Fritz (remember that Crafty has SMP capability just as good as Deep Fritz's).

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[PissingInTheWind]

Secondly, Go WILL, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be brute-forced

You really don't get it.

But anyway, I have to clarify why I was pissed that you got modded to 5. If don't give a shiat about karma or
whatever. What piss me off is that /FALSE/ informations get put in the spotlights as truths.

But anyway, it seems the problem is with me, and if I want intelligent, informative and insightful discussions
I'd better go elsewhere.

I think I should change my nick from "PissingInTheWind" to "PissedInTheWind".

Re:Chess, how boring... [parent is WRONG]

[ndogg]

I would love to see the algorithm that brute forces Go, because, currently, there isn't any. Sure, we may have the computing power in ten years to do so, but will we have the algorithm?

The problem with Go is that you can't use the traditional game AIs (such as min-max.) Most games can easily be brute forced by creating a tree of all the moves, and then creating an algorithm to traverse that tree (e.g. depth first, breadth first, A*, etc.) You could create a tree of all possible moves, but the tree would be useless since it many moves have the same amount of significance. You would end up placing lots of random pieces on the board until you can see a definite sequence of moves to capture [a] piece[s]. That, in my opinion, is not a brute force algorithm.

Let me do the math for you

[p3d0]

Actually, it was quite a good analogy. You simply are not grasping the vastness of the Go search space. It is perfectly safe to say that it will never, ever be brute-forced with conventional (non-quantum) computers. And I feel fairly safe going on record saying that it will never, ever be brute forced even with non-quantum computers.

Each intersection in Go can have a black piece, a white piece, or nothing, making for 3^361 possible board configurations, which is around 10^172. If every particle in the universe were Deep Fritz working throughout a million lifetimes of the universe, we would still be many orders of magnitude short of brute-forcing Go.