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Kramnik Ties Fritz; Machines Not Yet Our Masters
Maltov writes "World Chess Champion V. Kramnik ties his match against the software Fritz. Details here.
You can also check out a picture gallery and a short history of computer chess."
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That's not known to be true. For a particular game, either the one moves first, or the one who moves second might (if the combinatorics are fully worked out) always win in perfect play.
> If two chess players play perfectly, then the game will always result in a tie.
There was a time when people put a lot of weight on a computer being able to play a high level of chess, but that was before the advent of a strategy that is best characterised as massive parallel brute force solution of a game with a very large tree of possible moves.
Nowadays, there really is very little point. You are comparing apples to oranges when you allow the one party a nearly infinite budget of cycles and power and allow the other party 18 cycles per second on a biological processor that is running on a couple of oranges for a whole games' worth of computation.
I we want to make this kind of competition interesting again I think there really should be limits on the power and cycle budget of the machine involved in order to get back to the essence of the whole game theory thing, which is not going flat out for the maximum number of ply you can look ahead but to try to quantify a strategic advantage.
Unfortunately that will not make for interesting press releases.
To me the current 'matches' look a little bit like sledgehammers being used to crack nuts. It does work, but there is no real output. All this stuff proves is that if you throw enough money at a problem you can force the outcome of something as trivial as a game of chess.
It does not advance the state of the art in computing at all.
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Most participants in #hotsex would fail the Turing test regardless.
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Go is an interesting way to spend time - you can relax your anylitical mind and just let the tactical beauty of the game influance your next move. It's also not as comptetive as Chess - I remember chess wins and losses, but my games of Go are catagoriesed as either fun or bland.
Chess, to me, is a General mashaling troops to battle. Go is like a child playing in the sandbox - having fun, exploring, trying new ideas, making castles.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
...It's Man vs. Nature.
Kramnik and Kasparov are the best chess players that nature can produce. Meanwhile, humans have built Fritz and Deep Blue. We aren't in the process of losing to machines. We're in the process of beating nature.
There's always something disappointing about a draw. I would have liked to see a clear winner, either man or machine, but it wasn't meant to be. That being said, I am not disappointed with the overall match. I think it showed human innovation in two ways, one in the powerful AI technology developed over the years used by Deep Fritz, and one in Kramnik being able to attack Fritz's weaknesses.
What's more disappointing than the draw, however, is that this match was not nearly as publicized as Deep Blue vs. Kasparov.
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Counterexample. We have a counter that starts at 0. Each player on his turn adds an integer from 1 to 9 to the counter. The winner is the player whose turn puts the counter over 99.
That game is deterministic, sequential, no draws are possible, and with perfect play the second player wins.
Anyone who has seen the games and knows even a little of chess and computer chess can tell that Kramnik won this match. The first three games he steers brilliantly, forcing the computer to play positions it doesn't understand and beating it twice. He then changes his strategy to aim for more computer-oriented positions and loses two games to draw the match? Gimme a break. His losses to the machine were his own choice -- he had already proven he could force it into positions that modern computer chess programs can't hope to understand. Whether he chose to wander into such unfriendly waters as a show of confidence or because of monetary...issues is a question for the philosophers.
If AMD was smart, they'd sponsor a rematch next summer, and use Operton servers to run Fritz. That'd be a great way to get publicity for their new hardware, and Deep Fritz would be more powerful as a result. OK, systems running Intel would be too, but the general public would still be impressed by ads touting "Deep Fritz running on AMD Operton(TM) systems 50% faster than the Intel Pentium 4(TM) systems in last fall's match!"
This is dumb. People play chess to interact with other people. To test eachother's strength, powers of concentration, and to just have a good time.
The computer will have beaten us at chess when it becomes a more interesting person to be around than a human (some geeks may think this is already the case; they will discover, to their detriment, that they are wrong).
The paper cited above is interesting as it shows what some computer scientists think about the difficulty of a computer playing ever playing go. However, to put it in proper perspective it should also be remembered that before the 1980's computer scientists and chess players are also of the belief that computers cannot be made to play chess. What a difference two decades make!
However, let me point out the following two quotes from Burmeister and my personal opinion on these.
These two quotes show the state of Go programming today:
Point two is what most people who have an opinion on the computer chess vs computer go debate fail to consider. The fact that computers play chess by brute force searching of tries does not mean that that approach is, ergo, the only possible approach to computer go.
In fact a bit of computer chess history should dispel that notion. When researchers first tried to tackle the problem of computer chess, it was rather obvious that a brute force approach is not the ideal way to do it. The number of possible positions in chess is so huge that it is not possible to solve chess using the technology available at that time. Instead they went for the heuristic approach.
In this approach researches looked for a function Eval(p) such that given a position p, Eval(p) will evaluate whether one side is ahead or not. If Eval(p) is found, so they think, then it is possible to use a greedy algorithm to chess. The computer simply picks that position p_n where Eval(p_n) is a maximum. No need for brute force! Unfortunately Eval(p) proved intractable because of one aspect of chess: sacrifice. In a chess sacrifice, Eval(p) is screwed up by the temporary giving up of an advantage (material, or position) in order to gain a future advantage. It turned out that there is no way to program a chess computer without look-ahead. And that is essentially how all computer's today play chess, by brute force lookahead coupled with other heuristics.
The state of computer go is not yet that advanced for either me or anyone to say for certainty that there is no Eval(p) for go. But if, as I suspect (let's just say it's a gambler's gut-feeling reinforced, in fact, by a reading of Burmeister plus the fact that go stones cannot move and thus their present fixed position must contribute to Eval(p)) there is in fact an Eval(p) for go, then go will prove to be easier to program than chess.
All the above is my opinion only. There goes my karma.
Plenty of stones die and are removed from the board, plenty of stones are sacrificed during a game... Won't this screw your mythical Eval(p)?
By the way, the article you refer to is six-years old; perhaps things have slightly changed in the computer Go world since then? E.g., Gnu Go has become much better this past year, and so have others, probably.
Play some Go seriously, you'll understand better why computers still have a long way to Go...
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Wimps!