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Behind Deep Blue

ianb104 writes "I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match, when the news came over the car radio that Kasparov resigned after less than one hour of play, to my great dismay. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion brought back this memory and then some." Read on for the rest of Ian's review. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion author Feng-hsiung Hsu pages 298 publisher Princeton University Press rating 9 reviewer ianb104 ISBN 0691090653 summary A real-life historic triumph of the nerds

My wife gave me this book as a birthday present. I was thrilled that finally someone wrote what really happened behind the scenes at the two historic matches, but Behind Deep Blue turned out to be far more than just about the matches. The early part of the book is equally absorbing and full of surprises.

Who & What

Feng-hsiung Hsu, the author, was the father of the Deep Blue project and a troublemaker. When you see a section title like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" in a book about computer history, you know something is up. What he did in this particular section would have been an awful career move today, like landing him in a jail. As it was, he almost got kicked out of grad school. This precarious position played an important role in how the project got started.

The book has two main parts: the beginning and the history of the project at Carnegie Mellon University, and the successful conclusion at IBM, including the two matches with Kasparov.

Carnegie Mellon

During the matches, the IBM web site de-emphasized the Carnegie Mellon part of the project. The instant chess books also failed to fill the void. It was a shame.

The main ideas behind the project apparently were formed at Carnegie Mellon--several of them at a fateful night in Hsu's apartment. I know little about IC design, but his description of the new ideas discovered at that night, underlying the first single chip chess move generator, made me feel like that I could design the chip myself. His thought process in coming to the discovery is also quite interesting. Hsu seems to be a diehard Trekkie. In his description of the selective search algorithm "singular extensions," he repeatedly used the Starship Enterprise in his analogies.

For fans of AI, the book contains a big surprise. Even though Deep Blue's triumph over Kasparov might be considered as a major victory for AI, several of the early members involved in its creation had a definite anti-AI opinion. An exact quote from the book is "AI is bullshit." Hsu himself had an ambiguous feeling toward AI. The main approach taken by the Deep Blue project was to push the technology envelope, which is certainly non-AI, but he also talked of the need for chess knowledge repeatedly in the book.

The central story at Carnegie Mellon revolves around the rivalry between a ragtag group of graduate students and a powerful professor, Dr. Hans Berliner, who is a former World Correspondence Chess Champion and world renowned authority on computer games. I have a feeling that there are things left unsaid in the book, but the intensity of the rivalry and the male egos all come through clearly. One of the thorny points to the students, strangely enough, was that they were not Dr. Berliner's students but the press kept on saying they were.

After the students came out with Deep Thought, the first Grandmaster strength computer, the incorrect press perception produced a very funny story. The story of "The Poor Lieutenant Colonel at Darpa" tells how an overzealous reporter wrote a cover article for the British magazine Spectator, purporting to have discovered that the U.S. Department of Defense had enlisted the service of chess computers. In the process of this discovery, the reporter phoned Dr. Berliner, whom the reporter thought was heading the Deep Thought project, for the inside scoop, and afterwards cold called a Lieutenant Colonel at Darpa in charge of expert systems research, which had nothing to do with the Deep Thought work...

IBM

I did not realize that the Deep Blue team played Kasparov publicly three times. The first time was with the machine Deep Thought, during the transitional period when the team moved to IBM. Kasparov won that match 2-0. The publicity from this match and the subsequent confusion between "Deep Thought" and "Deep Throat" were partially responsible for the new Deep Blue name. The original Deep Thought name came from the sci-fi trilogy Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

The story of the completion of the first Deep Blue repeats a theme that recurs throughout the book--the machines always barely work in time. "Four Hours to Spare" describes a period when the first Deep Blue chip had to be used in a new program and had to win or tie an exhibition match, in order for the project to survive. The team barely got the new program "working" with four hours to spare. They managed a tie.

The late-to-arrive situation in the 1996 Deep Blue match itself was not much better--the very first ever game played by Deep Blue was none other than its first game with Kasparov. Deep Blue itself was being put together only weeks before. Deep Blue won this game. What Kasparov said right after the historic game is priceless. There should have been a microphone at the playing table. The behind-the-scenes coverage of this match is more detailed than available anywhere else, but not quite as extensive as that of the final match in the book.

Deep Blue's loss in 1996 spurred a series of activities by the team. I don't recall seeing them mentioned explicitly during the 1997 match. A new Deep Blue chip was designed, along with new software tools for match preparations. The story of "The Phantom Queens" is quite amusing. The team discovered a design bug in the new chip that caused phantom queens to be generated on the chip's internal chessboard. One way to fix the bug was to slow down the chip by disabling a design feature. As a result of this slowdown, we have the only match outcome of what might have happen if Deep Blue had been running at the same speed as commercial chess programs when competing against them. I will let you find out for yourself what the outcome was. A workaround was later implemented, and Deep Blue did not suffer the same slowdown in the match against Kasparov.

The big chapter on the 1997 match alone is worth the price of the book for me. It was a great deal of fun to read. The wild accusations, the missed opportunities, the psychological war game off the board, the battle through the media, and plain simple misunderstanding all make for wonderful reading. The arbiter, Carol Jarecki, summed it up quite well, "This match has it all." I don't want to spoil all the fun for you, but I will mention two interesting tidbits from game 1 and game 6. Deep Blue played the last move of game 1 as a result of bug, although the game was already lost. Kasparov's team was surprised by the move and spent all night to find out why Deep Blue played the move and concluded that Deep Blue played its move because it saw a very deep mate if it had played what should be played... Game 6 was widely reported as Kasparov forgetting his own opening preparations. It could very well have been a deliberate gamble instead. All the other programs at the time, including the 1996 version of Deep Blue, very possibly would have lost the white side of the game.

Other Stuff

The epilogue of the book contains a short description of what happened after 1997, including an aborted attempt to answer Kasparov's repeated challenge for a new match. The first appendix gives autobiographic materials. The other two give selected game scores and pointers for further reading.

General Comments

This is not a chess book, and you don't need to be a chess player to enjoy it. The few paragraphs on technology should be readable for high school students or younger kids with scientific interests. Or you can just skip them.

The book is not really one contiguous story, but a collection of short stories and anecdotes. I read the whole book in one setting, but you could easily read the book in smaller chunks at a time.

Quibbles

Okay, you probably don't need an index for this book, but it would have been nice to have one. Interestingly enough, at www.bn.com, the review mentioned "a strange, inaccurate index", which must have there in the prepublication copy.

Conclusions

I highly recommend the book for general reading. You are not going to learn how to build something like Deep Blue from this book, but you get a good sense of what kind of human struggles it takes. Computer scientists and electrical engineers should get a good kick out of the book, but a layperson can enjoy the book just as well. If you have young kids with interests in engineering or science, this might be a good gift for them.

You can purchase Behind Deep Blue from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

138 comments

  1. Re:Rushing home !?! by Anonymous+MadCoe · · Score: 1

    Actually it can be...
    I have been to a number of matches, alwais fun live and on TV.

    And yes not seeing it live takes away some of the charm.....

  2. Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Adam+Rightmann · · Score: 5, Insightful

    move game. True, human's can't interpret the billions of possible moves, and only understand basic repeated patterns (try it with you local grandmaster, they can memorize any board of a game in play, but can't memorize a randomly placed board). True, human pattern recognition is far better than machines, but in the end chess is just billions of possible moves, and now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

    True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine, and I'm not sure if that's possible. Perhaps the day when we see a computer sit down and ponder it's origins, and even pray, then we can think we've created an AI ( but will it have a soul?).

    --
    A. Rightmann
    1. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by smd4985 · · Score: 1

      excellent points. if i had mod points, i'd mod you up!

      i'll be impressed when a computer can take the initiative to create 'episode II - attack of the clones' or 'pride and prejudice'. the humanity and imagination put into artistic works represent true intelligence to me.

      then again, some of you may not think episode II was very artistic. sorry, but i loved it. ;)

      --
      smd4985
    2. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by j4pjeff · · Score: 1

      Humans also make mistakes, computers do not(they do exactly as they were programmed to). The other side of this is that a human can purposly make mistakes as a stragey that computers are far from understandind. So all in all a human will always have the advantage of creativity over computers processing advantage.

    3. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      computers do make mistakes, it's called hardware errors ( like bad ram or a crashed disk ). yes, one can program around those ( by using RAID/ ecc ), but still.

    4. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Scarblac · · Score: 5, Insightful

      True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine,

      Thinking yes, feeling no; that would be AE, and I don't see much point in that.

      Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.

      Just that you know, and are able to understand how it does it, does not mean it's not intelligent.

      But of course, stupendously narrowly intelligent :-). It couldn't recognize a chess piece if it had a .png of one. General AI is, of course, a very different beast. But suppose we solve that problem and you'll still be able to understand how it works - wouldn't it still be general AI?

      And feeling... nah, in us that's a result of our evolution, but general intelligence doesn't need it.

      --
      I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
    5. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by j4pjeff · · Score: 1

      Yes you must factor in hardware errors and everything else of that matter. But the computer didn't really make a mistake or over look somthing. It is like a human having a migrain or some other type of impared judgment.

    6. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by pussycat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      but in the end chess is just billions of possible moves, and now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

      What you say is true is true, but in the past, chess seemed like a problem that computers would never "understand" and thus would always be second to humans. Even though the solution may not seem elegant, it nonetheless works.

      This solution may not have been imaginable forty years ago. Perhaps forty years from now, we'll be able to brute force "a real thinking, feeling machine."

      A great book for idiots like me on how true AI may be possible is Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind.

    7. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by merlin_jim · · Score: 5, Interesting

      now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

      There are actually two major branches of thought on the matter, neither one is proven. The statement you make is one such branch of thought, that can be stated more precisely as:

      A perfectly played game of chess will never result in a loss, and will only result in a tie if the opponent also plays a perfect game

      However there is also another school of thought, which points out the lie in your statement. This thought can be stated as:

      In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition. There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.

      The reasoning behind this is that there is no single opening move that results in the entire game-tree having no checkmates for one player. And that no subsequent move can prune out checkmates, until the end-game. Thus, a perfect player could possibly get itself into a situation where a check mate is forced on it.

      I don't know whether that's true or not. One part of me says yes, that seems true, while another part of me says, why doesn't the program just choose a path where any move it can make results in an end-game with no checkmates with itself. I'm not sure such a path exists; even if it does, I would call a system built to choose this path AI.

      Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming.

      Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team. It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.

      Such a system would certainly qualify, in my eyes, as AI.

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    8. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Arjen · · Score: 1
      ...but will it have a soul?


      Oh please. As long as we cannot clearly define what the human soul is, we cannot possibly recreate one in a computer. And since each definition of soul is bound to encourage (part-time) philosophers to say that a soul is something immaterial, and cannot be defined, we're stuck with soulless AIs.


      Not that that is a big problem though. Humans should stick with things they do best (emotions and various other soul-based-activities), and computers should stick to their core business: calculations.

    9. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by The+Grassy+Knoll · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >and even pray

      The day a computer sits down and prays is the day I get the next spaceship off this planet.

      And anyway, if a computer is intelligent enough to be 'a real thinking ... machine', then I should hope it's intelligent enough to reject a thought system based on faith rather than reason.

      Just my 2p worth

      --
      They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
    10. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Loki_1929 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      "Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited (Score:4, Troll)"

      They modding up for trolling now? Uh Oh..

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    11. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humans do not (unintentionally) make mistakes unless they are fed incorrect information. The same is true for computer systems.

    12. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Marx_Mrvelous · · Score: 3

      Are you *sure* that they're proven that Chess is always a tuie (if played perfectly)? I thought that, due to the nature of the game mathematicians haven't been able to prove one way or another what the end of the game would be. just for my personal knowledge, can you cite a source for these claims?

      --

      Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
    13. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "A perfectly played game of chess will never result in a loss, and will only result in a tie if the opponent also plays a perfect game"

      No, the player who goes first has an advantage. A perfect player playing white should win every time.

    14. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by merlin_jim · · Score: 2

      Are you *sure* that they're proven that Chess is always a tuie (if played perfectly)? I thought that, due to the nature of the game mathematicians haven't been able to prove one way or another what the end of the game would be. just for my personal knowledge, can you cite a source for these claims?

      Actually, I said that there were two schools of thought and that neither one was proven. So, yeah, you're right and so am I. No proof. None. And I kept up the same "I don't know which one is right and neither does anyone else" tone throughout the whole post.

      Read more carefully before replying next time. Move along. Nothing to see here.

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    15. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2

      Anything that a computer can do is not AI. Therefore, chess is not AI. But it used to be, a long time ago.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    16. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Ed+Avis · · Score: 3

      If you could work out all possible games of chess, you'd be able to determine the optimum strategy for each player, and 'solve' the game of chess. You'd find one of three results:

      - The game is a win for white.

      - The game is a win for black.

      - The game is a draw or stalemate.

      Some games have been solved like this: certainly 3x3 noughts and crosses, and there was a Slashdot story about Owari a while ago. Chess is a long way off because the space of possible games is so vast.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    17. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by AshPattern · · Score: 1

      When you find an example of general intelligence that is not simultaneously accompanied and interconnected with emotion, you let me know. That will lend at least some credibility to your authoritative claims about what intelligence is and is not.

    18. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by tomhudson · · Score: 2
      I was under the impression that white, as the first to move, has a slight advantage, and that there might be trees that result in a white win, even though both sides play perfectly.

      I must say that this is one of the best reviews that I've read on slashdot - not the usual crap^H^H^H^Hstuff.

    19. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by krouic · · Score: 1

      It really depends on what is meant by AI. The trend in the past has been to qualify as AI any task that what not possible for computers, but then, as soon as computers were able to perform them, to not consider them of an "intelligent" nature anymore. It is a kind of perpetually moving goal.

      For instance, being able to perform complicated calculations, like extracting a square root, used to be considered as a sign a great intelligence. Now that computers can do this much faster and more exactly, it is considered as the dumb execution of a predefined algorithm.

      We see the same attitude here : chess used to be considered as an ultimate sign of human intelligence, because it seemed to require a sense of strategy that can not be formalized and transformed into an algorithm. However, we have seen that enough brute force and cleverly tuned algorithms can compensate that lack of "vision".

      So we now have to find another task that will (again) be the ultimate proof that computer can/not be considered as intelligent.

    20. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by sifi · · Score: 2

      I remember reading somewhere that the number of possible positions in chess is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

      It is extrememly unlikely that you could ever build a machine to 'solve' chess (i.e. analyse every possible play). Therefore a chess computer (or a human for that matter) can never play a 'perfect' game of chess.

      Therefore, any good system would also have to take into accound some sort of strategic play (fuzzy logic, A.I - whatever) - this is what makes chess programs interesting.

      --
      Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
    21. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by merlin_jim · · Score: 2

      If you could work out all possible games of chess, you'd be able to determine the optimum strategy for each player, and 'solve' the game of chess. You'd find one of three results:

      My point being that, until we've done that, one can't really make a statement to the effect of "An infinitely powerful computer will always win"... which is, paraphrased, what the original poster said.

      There are two ways to prove such a statement; both of them result in a general solution to the game of chess, as you describe. The first way is to compute all possible games and characterize them mathematically. Though difficult, this is possible. This is analguous to brute-forcing a public-key encryption algorithm whose key-length is equal to the number of possible moves. It's gonna take a while, but it's possible. There's no reason you can't do it.

      The second way is to take a couple dozen smart mathematicians and have them look at the system and analyze it mathematically. This is analguous to breaking an algorithm. Most algorithms it's possible to break, though a precious few it is not. So far chess looks unbreakable, and we've found pretty strong evidence that it is theoretically unbreakable.

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    22. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by mpsmps · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.

      It is possible to play chess either by raw computation or intelligence. People use their intelligence to play chess. Deep Blue did not.

      Here's an analogy that works for me. A computer can be easily programmed to determine that 1000000003 is not a sum of two square by exhaustive computation. No one (I hope) would contend that is an intelligent computer program. On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence. Deep Blue took the exhaustive computation approach to chess.

    23. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Marx_Mrvelous · · Score: 1

      You tell the original post he's lying, when he's actually quite correct: There are indeed a finite number of moves in chess. Whether or not there's a "perfect game" that guarantees a win is inconsequential.

      Going onto your claim that programming a mchine to take a predetermined path is AI ( " I'm not sure such a path exists; even if it does, I would call a system built to choose this path AI.") directly contradicts the original post, but then you later say " Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming." You're contradicting yourself.

      Think more carefully before replying next time. Move along. Nothing to see here.

      --

      Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
    24. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by tshak · · Score: 2

      True AI would be a real thinking

      True AI is would be nothing, because the entire concept of Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron. We call systems AI (aerospace anti-collision systems, "smart bombs", and Rainbow Six's "Tagno's"), but in reality these systems - even though they "learn" - are still complex calculators.

      --

      There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
    25. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interestingly, it appears that humans do not memorise chess positions using pattern recognition (as I think Ferdinand Gobet argues). Recent work (McGregor & Howes, 2002) has shown that, yes even expert players can't memorise random positions, but it seems that the memory strategy is a relational or semantic one. E.g., the knight is being threatened by the rook, but protected by two pawns and a bishop.

      Given the starting positions are always the same there is a "story" to a chess games that experts can, to some extent, "reconstruct" this story from the present position.

      Thus, the reason even expert players can't memorise random boards is because, to an extent, there isn't a consistent story behind it: random positions make no sense and can be detected as "inorganic" of the normal development of a chess game so to speak.

      With reference to the main story; just goes to show how different human and machine approaches are. Algorithms aside, the representational scheme doesn't seem in any way analagous.

    26. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You could write a computer program that would incorporate exactly that rule, and then it would be able "to determine that 1000000003 is not a sum of two square" by the simple analysis you describe. "Independent" discovery of this rule could also be arranged.

      If you think Kasparov doesn't use an "exhaustive computation computation approach to chess" then you don't have a great understanding of how the brain works. We're a great big pattern matching machine. Kasparov has trained his pattern matching machine to take in chess positions and output decent chess moves. He then selects among those decent chess moves based on... exhaustive computation.

      If you'd like to arbitrarily choose a definition of intelligence that machines will never be able to attain... pick a different arbitrary definition. The difference between warm fuzzy intelligence and cold computational intelligence... can be engineered. And in this case, it doesn't matter.

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    27. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Scarblac · · Score: 2

      On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence.

      You've just described a test for intelligence that 99.9% of humans would fail. And yet a computer, who could pass the test but by some different method, isn't as intelligent as a human? Doesn't sound like a good test.

      --
      I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
    28. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by dg123 · · Score: 0

      There is no definition of "artificial intelligence" that is generally admitted.


      Since we can't find any formal definition of intelligence, finding one for artificial intelligence is not obvious neither. So we have to accept one that keeps the same subjectivity as the term "intelligence" suggests, for instance : Artificial intelligence : The art of automating tasks that are generally done by humans.

    29. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't assume that human chess players recognise chess positions only by rather blunt pattern recognition processes; recent research suggests otherwise:

      McGregor, S.J. & Howes, A. (2002) The role of attack and defence semantics in skilled players' memory for chess positions. Memory and Cognition, 30, 707-717.

      Abstract:
      There is much evidence that skill for chess is based on chunks in memory that represent parts of positions from previously encountered games. However, the content of these chunks is a matter for debate. According to one view (a) the closer two pieces are to each other on a board (proximity) then the more likely they are to be found in the same chunk, and (b) skilled players encode the precise locations of pieces. An alternative view is that what information is encoded in a chess chunk is determined more by processing of the attack/defence relations during evaluation than by proximity and location. We report three experiments in which participants evaluated positions and completed recognition tests. Experiment 1 supported the view that expert players made more use of attack/defence relations than locations of pieces in a recognition test. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that, for both long and short presentation times, expert players recognition memory for a piece within a position was primed more by a piece related by attack or defence than by a piece that was merely proximal. The experiments support the view that when skilled chess players engage in a process of evaluation they make use of chunks encoded more in terms of attack/defence relations between pieces than in terms of proximity or location. These findings challenge theories of expertise for chess that assume a primary role for proximity and location in determining which pieces are grouped together in memory.

      What is perhaps most sad about Deep Blue is that in many ways it really wasn't AI in that sense that it in any way representative of how humans play chess on a cognitive level. The nearest analogy I can think of is when long standing mathematical problems are solved through brute force computer attacks it seems sad because rather unsatistfying on an aesthetic level; I think its nicer to see a qualitative difference between players (e.g. X's new opening was very novel) than a quantiative difference (e.g., X checked 1000 more possible moves that second). Rather takes the fun out of it (for the chess player, if not the computer scientist)

    30. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Theatetus · · Score: 2, Interesting
      We're a great big pattern matching machine. Kasparov has trained his pattern matching machine to take in chess positions and output decent chess moves. He then selects among those decent chess moves based on... exhaustive computation.

      Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree. A human chess player's computations are specifically *not* exhaustive. A human player seeks to hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces and works backwards to see which moves make that most likely. Deep Blue runs through tons of moves and sees which moves hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces.

      There are chess programs that work like human players work: establishing strategic goals and trying to work out ways to get to them. But none of them are very good.

      Kasparov's strategy was to keep DB out of any position that would let it come up with a surprising (to a human) move through exhaustive analysis, which is why all the matches looked like Flanders in WWI. Also, Kasparov is probably the worst GM for a computer/human match... he plays very dramatic, emotional games and wins by humiliating and terrifying the opponent, which wouldn't work against a computer.

      --
      All's true that is mistrusted
    31. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by dandelion_wine · · Score: 1

      Change my brain chemistry, change my emotions.

      Last time I checked, Deep Blue's epinephrine and serotonin levels were nonexistant.

    32. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SOURCES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS
      45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women and common among the Australian aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But is does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.

      46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources.

      47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

    33. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Pussy+Is+Money · · Score: 0

      Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.


      Argh. This has all gotten terribly out of hand.



      Look, it's not that hard. Humans devised chess to have a good time and to use it as a yardstick to measure (not immediately obvious) characteristics in other humans. Such as the capacity to sit still for long periods of time and the capacity to plan ahead, among others.



      This is the nature of almost all games and it is human nature to enjoy that sort of thing. But the yardstick of chess is only valid when applied to humans. The metric of "chess" is meaningless when applied to non-people.



      The intelligence of humans lies in their propensity to come up with games for both fun and profit. Therefore a human who plays and enjoys chess demonstrates intelligence. But a computer that plays chess does not (necessarily).

      --
      Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
    34. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by dandelion_wine · · Score: 1

      Wow. Chess a soul-based activity? And here I thought I often lose because I don't think more than 2 moves ahead. All along it was because I wasn't soulful enough.

    35. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by EvilBudMan · · Score: 1

      What about their new Deep Purple machine that IBM is building to test nukes? Does it have true AI or is it just more smoke on the water when it comes alive?

    36. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 2

      Right. But Kasparov was still working as hard as he thought he could, right?

      Whatever process it is that humans use to play chess, we're still a pattern matching machine that has to establish good algorithms, and then execute them exhaustively. Those algorithms might not be a move search, but rather a search for the key peices or squares. Grandparent poster decided that since Deep Blue wasn't introspective enough, it's not AI, or it's not interesting, or something. Actually, I'm not sure what his complaint was. So I was trying to illuminate his poorly defined complaint.

      Now I'm muddled.

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    37. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by wrt2 · · Score: 1

      I'd disagree that emotions are dispensible when discussing intelligence. Emotions are what filter out the (at least recursively enumerable) infinite true statements about the world to leave the residue of true statements that we feel are important. I don't care that if I am in Paris, my left foot also is in Paris. That's an emotional response. (If my left foot is in a box in Atlanta while I am in Paris, I might have a different emotional response.) Does Deep Blue care whether or not it wins? I'd say it can't, for any definition of care that I'd find reasonable, and hence it's not intelligent, artificially or otherwise. Descartes' Error goes into this in greater depth, especially how people with very little emotional affect are almost incapable of making decisions.

      --
      -- "Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep voting? Do you think you're voting for something?"
    38. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by linwoes · · Score: 1

      Your analogy is slightly flawed. You use a variety of mathematical laws and constructs that you have learned to slove the problem differently. Now a more true test would be to ask if a computer could be programmed to start at the fundamental properties of mathematics (ie 1+1=2), as humans once did, and create the proofs, theorems, laws, etc that we take for granted to solve more complex problems. AI is more about learning from experience rather than what are its capabilites now.

    39. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Practically speaking, chess is not a limited move game. According to "Artifical Intelligence A Modern Approach" by Russel and Norvig, a chess board has about 10^40 legal positions. A game typically runs about 50 moves for each player resulting in a "tree" of about 35^100 possible moves! This isn't tic-tac-toe for computers.

    40. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by ryochiji · · Score: 2
      >in the end chess is just billions of possible moves

      Billions? That's a little low... I read somewhere that there are more possible configurations on a chess board than there are atoms in the known universe (something like 10^743 combinations, IIRC). So no, I doubt processing power will be catching up anytime soon to do a real exhaustive search (and remember, after searching all combinations, you have to figure out which is the best one).

    41. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Most of you are making errors in your comments because you don't properly understand the game of chess, and how humans and chess algorithms differ fundamentally in their understanding of it.

      This probably won't make any sense for someone who isn't at the very least expert strength in chess, but you will just have to trust that I am in the know. There are basically two types of strategy in chess. The first is "tactical" strategy, which is what computers excel at, and what almost everyone who isn't fairly well experienced thinks is the *only* consideration in chess. Good tactics in chess is an understanding of how a series of (usually immediate) tradeoffs will result in material imbalances. Create a large enough material imbalance, and your opponent is lost. Then there is "positional" strategy, which is what computers have absolutely no understanding of (there are neural net chess algorithms that could be said to have a basic understanding of position, but their implementations are still sufficiently brute-forced and they are notoriously weak), and what humans excel at. What precisely is "position" in chess? It's hard to understand, so understandably it's hard to explain, and it's one of the reasons why chess is a difficult game to play well. But essentially good positional play is an understanding of how occupying, controlling, or placing pressure on certain squares on the board allows you to squeeze your opponent into positions which force eventual unavoidable tactical imbalances (for example loss of a piece or mate).

      It might seem then that position ultimately boils down to tactics, but this is not the case. Position and tactics are fundamentally different, and computers have the unfortunate disadvantage of not understanding position. As there are two different key strategies in chess, it makes sense that players and openings alike fall into the same two categories. There are highly positional players (e.g. Anatoly Karpov, the best positional player in the world) that play positional openings (e.g. c4, certain lines of d4) which lead to "closed games" with locked pawns, few trades, and few purely tactical considerations. Positional games are also highly likely to end in draws (amongst top level GMs), because humans have such a commanding understanding of position that there are few opportunities to create imbalances in the absence of blunders. This is one reason, for instance, that Karpov, as positional a player as they come, has a rating below his actual strength (other than the fact that he is old and his mind tires quickly), because draws don't do much for your rating. Then there are highly tactical players (e.g. Kasparov, a tactical beast and the strongest chess player of all time, and all strong computer programs) that play tactical openings (e.g. e4, certain lines of d4) which lead to "open games" with wide open spaces, where victory is dependent on piece mobility and the exploitation thereof.

      Immediately a few things can be observed. The way to beat a computer is to play positionally, and Kasparov, essentially the only highly tactical top level GM, is at a greater disadvantage than other GMs when he plays according to his natural playing style against a computer. This is not to say that Kasparov is not one of the strongest positional players in the world. To the contrary, he merely prefers tactical games because they lead to more winning chances and win he does. But there is no way Kasparov can exploit tactical imbalances against a computer, because (the best) computers pretty much can't be "tricked" into tactical errors due to their incomprehensibly fast and deep analysis of the tactical ramifications of any configuration of the board. The version of Deep Blue that beat Kasparov in a 6-game match was probably the first computer this could be said of, though there are a few other such computers today. Because Deep Blue was the first computer that could even come close to giving Kasparov a run for his money, it is not surprising he lost his first match against it. For one, as a few people have pointed out, Deep Blue was tailored and tuned by a team of top level GMs and programmers that had spent countless hours studying Kasparov's playing style, his preferred lines, and all his previous games. I have no doubt in my mind that any other top 20 GM would have crushed Deep Blue because it was a purely anti-Kasparov machine. Furthermore, that match was the first experience Kasparov had had against a strong computer. All his previous matches against Deep Blue's predecessors had resulted in Garry winning soundly. Since computers have utterly no understanding of position, their playing style is vastly different from that of a human's (so much so that any top level GM today can tell you with 100% accuracy if a GM equivalent opponent is human or not), and as such, Kasparov had no experience against Deep Blue's playing style. He had played less than 10 games against Deep Blue's weaker predecessors, and playing those was at best akin to Kasparov preparing for a match against another top level GM based on games his opponent played as a child.

      Kasparov, of course, knew all these things, and let it get to his head. Rather than trust in his own strength (which probably would have allowed him to come out on top in '97), knowing that Deep Blue had been programmed specifically against his playing style, he completely abandoned his entire opening repertoire. Against people, Kasparov almost always plays the Sicilian Defense as black, yet, against Deep Blue, in every game as black, Kasparov played the Caro-Kann Defense, which is not a defense that he is as familiar with, and also offers fewer winning chances for black. In game four as white, Kasparov didn't open the game to control the center. He opened with d3 as white, which is extremely passive (completely unlike his normal playing style), and gives white no winning chances. In game six, in which Kasparov resigned after 19 moves, it is clear that Kasparov lost because of sadistic experimental urges. He played a line that literally every novice knows not to play. Move 7. ... h6 was a fatal error. Kasparov surely knew h6 can only be played on the 8th move or later. That move lead to a knight sacrifice by white on e6 which crushed black's King side. Why did Kasparov play such ridiculous lines against Deep Blue, moves that he wouldn't touch against a human? We can only assume he didn't believe a computer was capable of properly calculating moves with such material imbalances, which perhaps has more to do with Kasparov's lack of understanding of computers and how they played chess at the time. As I said before, Deep Blue was more or less the first computer that could play at anywhere near a "super" GM level. Nowadays, there are computers that are significantly better than Deep Blue, yet are pushovers for the likes of Kasparov and other top GMs, because humans now know how to modify their playing styles to effectively combat computers. For example, Peter Svidler, around 16th in the world, played a series of games against all the top rated computer programs, including Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, and The Shredder. Svidler won. There is an unbelievably vast difference between 16th in the world and 1st in the world, such that Svidler has never beaten Kasparov in a single game. It does not seem very plausible that computers that Svidler can defeat would then go on to defeat Kasparov. Another point worth noting in Kasparov's defense is that most one on one matches are 16 games, or even 21 games, when it comes to determining a World Champion. A six game match is hardly an accurate analysis of who is better ... again, not to mention that Kasparov had no way to prepare for an opponent which was developed in the secret labratories of IBM, an opponent that was specially tailored just for him (and tweaked after every round, I might add. For example, in '97 Kasparov slaughtered Deep Blue in game one with a novelty that would have worked every game thereafter had it not been for a panel of super GMs and IBM programmers tweaking Deep Blue after every match).

      One might cite the recent Kramnik-Fritz match as evidence that computers aren't as weak as I am making them out to be. Anyone that followed the games in that match and is experienced enough to understand what was played in the games and why would tell you that Kramnik is a stronger player than Fritz. For the first few games of the match, when Kramnik was sound of mind, he played strong, positional chess. As already discussed, computers can't deal with positional games. And while a human can't always force a game to be highly positional, it is almost always feasible to force an early queen trade and leave the game at least semi-closed, which strongly favors a human player. Kramnik only started losing when his ego, his hormones, his pride (who knows?) got the best of him. He was soundly winning the match (by 2.5 points to .5 points if I remember correctly) before he lost his first game. In the first game he lost, he was in a highly advantageous position before he made a knight sack that can only be described as foolish. A far superior move, Bd5, was an obvious win, and one can only wonder why Kramnik felt the need to sacrifice the knight. As soon as he made the move I knew at best he had a draw. Other GMs who were watching and commenting on the game also had nothing good to say about the move. And though the knight sack was certainly exciting (and ultimately led to a draw, though Kramnik resigned in the face of an exceptionally difficult endgame against a computer opponent that was guaranteed not to err with so few pieces on the board), it could only be described as a stupid move. After that Kramnik just seemed to fall apart only managed to pull a draw out of the match. (There is also some discussion as to whether Kramnik was sick during part of the match, as during one game he was forced to literally run to the bathroom.)

      In the coming Kasparov vs. Deep Junior match, it is a foregone conclusion that Kasparov will win. Kasparov is not one to repeat past errors; he learns well from his few mistakes. Kasparov is a much stronger player than Kramnik (and please don't argue that Kramnik beat Kasparov in a match in 2000 so is stronger ... Kramnik was Kasparov's second so it is understandable that he of all people would have a decent chance against Garry, plus Kasparov went on to beat Kramnik in a (non world championship) match in 2001 at Astana, and furthermore, who is the best is not determined by a single match, it is determined by who is the highest rated and most consistent, both honors which belong to Kasparov), while Deep Junior is only equivalent in strength to Deep Fritz. I would bet money that Kasparov won't lose a single game in the match, and I would be very surprised if he doesn't win at least as many games as he draws.

    42. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Jorrit · · Score: 2
      You are making a rather daring claim:


      'Anything a computer can do is not AI.'


      Why do you think that is true? That's like saying a computer can never do AI and that's something that I certainly don't believe (after all, the 'A' in AI stands for 'articifial'). The problem may be defining what AI actually is. This boils down to defining what intelligence is. And that's something I'm not going to do here in this limited space :-)


      Greetings,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    43. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by d0ggi3 · · Score: 1

      soul? grow up. what are you? one giant piece of information processing equipment made up of lots of seperate information processing systems. whats your brain? one complex computer.

      mistakes created intelligence. what happens when intelligence creates intelligence? we haven't come close to designing a computer complex to the nature of our brains. by saying we have souls is saying that we're special in someway. that we are something that cannot be created by humans. why don't you wait and decide on whether we do or don't have souls after all possible theories and experiments have been exausted? if you don't, you're giving up way to early and not giving science a fighting chance.

    44. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      No, the player who goes first has an advantage. A perfect player playing white should win every time.

      Brought to you by the Pulling Opinions Out Of Our Ass And Presenting Them As Facts committee.

    45. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by addaon · · Score: 2

      Actually, there are only two possibilities.

      - The game is a win for white.
      - The game is a draw or stalemate.

      This is because white has the (rarely used) option to pass first move to black.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
    46. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2

      I didn't say a computer can 'never' do AI. Some things like composing music may one day be satisfactorily performed by a computer. But at that point they will no longer be considered AI.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    47. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      Seriously? If you are playing as white you can choose who goes first? I never heard of that rule, but then I am not a big chess player.

      The fact that this option is so seldom exercised suggests that moving first does have an advantage, at least in the minds of experienced players. (And who is going to argue with them?)

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    48. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Jorrit · · Score: 2
      Hmm. I think that defines on how you define AI. If you define AI as Artifical Intelligence with artifical in the sense of intelligence by a non-natural entity (i.e. a computer) then it still remains artificial.


      Greetings,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    49. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Old+Wolf · · Score: 2

      Your comments are naive. "Billions" is a bit of an understatement - like going to a beach and saying "There are dozens of grains of sand here".

      Even the most recent man-machine match featured the human winning 2 games against the strongest computer in the world (it's much stronger than Deep Blue was), despite being able to see 20ply ahead in all lines and over 100ply ahead in selected lines.

      My point is that just brute force is not good enough to be an effective chess program; the programs also use various forms of reasoning to assess the position. Is intelligence more than just the use of heuristic algorithms?

    50. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Old+Wolf · · Score: 2

      Actually you can't, the guy was trolling.

      Having the first moves is clearly an advantage in chess (that is to say, for strategic reasons, without knowing the entire game tree).

    51. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by addaon · · Score: 2

      Actually wasn't trolling... just heard that many times, in analyses of the games. And yes, I play enough chess to know that playing white is good... but from a mathematical point of view, it's still *possible* (barring, again, some proof I haven't seen) that black has the winning path, just extremely unlikely based on our experience.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
    52. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by inode_buddha · · Score: 1

      mostly a great discussion here, but I have one caveat to your arguments about pattern matching: How do I account for the imagery and/or sensations in my dreams which do not match any pattern I currently know of or have experienced? How do I account for emotions in those dreams? Or the simple fact of dreaming all by itself?

      --
      C|N>K
    53. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 2

      Pattern matching in the brain occurs at all levels, including some much lower than you're thinking of. Pattern matching is what tells your brain that you're looking at the edge of an object, let alone what that object is.

      There are many higher level tasks that we do that become about pattern matching, and the best example are tasks that involve expertise. You become an expert at something when your brain optimizes its storage of the patterns it sees. Chess is a classic example. So is music composition. And spelling. And speech.

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    54. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by ralphbecket · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sorry, but this post does not show any insight into the problem.

      There are two schools of AI: "applied" AI tackles all the problems that conventional engineering hasn't a clue about (which is why "applied" AI fails so often); cognitive science attempts to come up with plausible, implementable explanations for various kinds of cognition (which is why you won't find cognitive scientists tackling applications-level problems.)

      I see no reason to argue one way or the other that a sophisticated machine intelligence (i.e. something which most people agreed was "intelligent" after observing it in action) would or would not exhibit behaviours that we might interpret as emotional responses.

      To put this in context, I only give other people the benefit of the doubt that they experience consciousness: there is as-yet no way for them to prove they actually are conscious rather than just automata giving a convincing impersonation.

      One final point on the topic of awareness: every computer program with finite resources can be reduced to a state machine which can be reduced to a lookup-table and an index into that table. People often get upset that even the fanciest AI program would also be subject to this sort of construction - they spend ages arguing why the lookup table would be a fake (would not be "aware") and the more complex program the real thing. The problem here is that nobody has a handle yet on what constitutes "aware"ness, so it seems to me that until we resolve this one, we have to stick to functionalism: if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, at least for the time being we might as well call it a dog.

    55. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by lazarius · · Score: 1

      (cbg impression): Funniest... Post ... Ever.

      MIKE

      --
      Beware the JabberOrk.
    56. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Most of you are making errors in your comments because you don't properly understand the game of chess, and how humans and chess algorithms differ fundamentally in their understanding of it.

      This probably won't make any sense for someone who isn't at the very least expert strength in chess, but you will just have to trust that I am in the know. There are basically two types of strategy in chess. The first is "tactical" strategy, which is what computers excel at, and what almost everyone who isn't fairly well experienced thinks is the *only* consideration in chess. Good tactics in chess is an understanding of how a series of (usually immediate) tradeoffs will result in material imbalances. Create a large enough material imbalance, and your opponent is lost. Then there is "positional" strategy, which is what computers have absolutely no understanding of (there are neural net chess algorithms that could be said to have a basic understanding of position, but their implementations are still sufficiently brute-forced and they are notoriously weak), and what humans excel at. What precisely is "position" in chess? It's hard to understand, so understandably it's hard to explain, and it's one of the reasons why chess is a difficult game to play well. But essentially good positional play is an understanding of how occupying, controlling, or placing pressure on certain squares on the board allows you to squeeze your opponent into positions which force eventual unavoidable tactical imbalances (for example loss of a piece or mate).

      It might seem then that position ultimately boils down to tactics, but this is not the case. Position and tactics are fundamentally different, and computers have the unfortunate disadvantage of not understanding position. As there are two different key strategies in chess, it makes sense that players and openings alike fall into the same two categories. There are highly positional players (e.g. Anatoly Karpov, the best positional player in the world) that play positional openings (e.g. c4, certain lines of d4) which lead to "closed games" with locked pawns, few trades, and few purely tactical considerations. Positional games are also highly likely to end in draws (amongst top level GMs), because humans have such a commanding understanding of position that there are few opportunities to create imbalances in the absence of blunders. This is one reason, for instance, that Karpov, as positional a player as they come, has a rating below his actual strength (other than the fact that he is old and his mind tires quickly), because draws don't do much for your rating. Then there are highly tactical players (e.g. Kasparov, a tactical beast and the strongest chess player of all time, and all strong computer programs) that play tactical openings (e.g. e4, certain lines of d4) which lead to "open games" with wide open spaces, where victory is dependent on piece mobility and the exploitation thereof.

      Immediately a few things can be observed. The way to beat a computer is to play positionally, and Kasparov, essentially the only highly tactical top level GM, is at a greater disadvantage than other GMs when he plays according to his natural playing style against a computer. This is not to say that Kasparov is not one of the strongest positional players in the world. To the contrary, he merely prefers tactical games because they lead to more winning chances and win he does. But there is no way Kasparov can exploit tactical imbalances against a computer, because (the best) computers pretty much can't be "tricked" into tactical errors due to their incomprehensibly fast and deep analysis of the tactical ramifications of any configuration of the board. The version of Deep Blue that beat Kasparov in a 6-game match was probably the first computer this could be said of, though there are a few other such computers today. Because Deep Blue was the first computer that could even come close to giving Kasparov a run for his money, it is not surprising he lost his first match against it. For one, as a few people have pointed out, Deep Blue was tailored and tuned by a team of top level GMs and programmers that had spent countless hours studying Kasparov's playing style, his preferred lines, and all his previous games. I have no doubt in my mind that any other top 20 GM would have crushed Deep Blue because it was a purely anti-Kasparov machine. Furthermore, that match was the first experience Kasparov had had against a strong computer. All his previous matches against Deep Blue's predecessors had resulted in Garry winning soundly. Since computers have utterly no understanding of position, their playing style is vastly different from that of a human's (so much so that any top level GM today can tell you with 100% accuracy if a GM equivalent opponent is human or not), and as such, Kasparov had no experience against Deep Blue's playing style. He had played less than 10 games against Deep Blue's weaker predecessors, and playing those was at best akin to Kasparov preparing for a match against another top level GM based on games his opponent played as a child.

      Kasparov, of course, knew all these things, and let it get to his head. Rather than trust in his own strength (which probably would have allowed him to come out on top in '97), knowing that Deep Blue had been programmed specifically against his playing style, he completely abandoned his entire opening repertoire. Against people, Kasparov almost always plays the Sicilian Defense as black, yet, against Deep Blue, in every game as black, Kasparov played the Caro-Kann Defense, which is not a defense that he is as familiar with, and also offers fewer winning chances for black. In game four as white, Kasparov didn't open the game to control the center. He opened with d3 as white, which is extremely passive (completely unlike his normal playing style), and gives white no winning chances. In game six, in which Kasparov resigned after 19 moves, it is clear that Kasparov lost because of sadistic experimental urges. He played a line that literally every novice knows not to play. Move 7. ... h6 was a fatal error. Kasparov surely knew h6 can only be played on the 8th move or later. That move lead to a knight sacrifice by white on e6 which crushed black's King side. Why did Kasparov play such ridiculous lines against Deep Blue, moves that he wouldn't touch against a human? We can only assume he didn't believe a computer was capable of properly calculating moves with such material imbalances, which perhaps has more to do with Kasparov's lack of understanding of computers and how they played chess at the time. As I said before, Deep Blue was more or less the first computer that could play at anywhere near a "super" GM level. Nowadays, there are computers that are significantly better than Deep Blue, yet are pushovers for the likes of Kasparov and other top GMs, because humans now know how to modify their playing styles to effectively combat computers. For example, Peter Svidler, around 16th in the world, played a series of games against all the top rated computer programs, including Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, and The Shredder. Svidler won. There is an unbelievably vast difference between 16th in the world and 1st in the world, such that Svidler has never beaten Kasparov in a single game. It does not seem very plausible that computers that Svidler can defeat would then go on to defeat Kasparov. Another point worth noting in Kasparov's defense is that most one on one matches are 16 games, or even 21 games, when it comes to determining a World Champion. A six game match is hardly an accurate analysis of who is better ... again, not to mention that Kasparov had no way to prepare for an opponent which was developed in the secret labratories of IBM, an opponent that was specially tailored just for him (and tweaked after every round, I might add. For example, in '97 Kasparov slaughtered Deep Blue in game one with a novelty that would have worked every game thereafter had it not been for a panel of super GMs and IBM programmers tweaking Deep Blue after every match).

      One might cite the recent Kramnik-Fritz match as evidence that computers aren't as weak as I am making them out to be. Anyone that followed the games in that match and is experienced enough to understand what was played in the games and why would tell you that Kramnik is a stronger player than Fritz. For the first few games of the match, when Kramnik was sound of mind, he played strong, positional chess. As already discussed, computers can't deal with positional games. And while a human can't always force a game to be highly positional, it is almost always feasible to force an early queen trade and leave the game at least semi-closed, which strongly favors a human player. Kramnik only started losing when his ego, his hormones, his pride (who knows?) got the best of him. He was soundly winning the match (by 2.5 points to .5 points if I remember correctly) before he lost his first game. In the first game he lost, he was in a highly advantageous position before he made a knight sack that can only be described as foolish. A far superior move, Bd5, was an obvious win, and one can only wonder why Kramnik felt the need to sacrifice the knight. As soon as he made the move I knew at best he had a draw. Other GMs who were watching and commenting on the game also had nothing good to say about the move. And though the knight sack was certainly exciting (and ultimately led to a draw, though Kramnik resigned in the face of an exceptionally difficult endgame against a computer opponent that was guaranteed not to err with so few pieces on the board), it could only be described as a stupid move. After that Kramnik just seemed to fall apart only managed to pull a draw out of the match. (There is also some discussion as to whether Kramnik was sick during part of the match, as during one game he was forced to literally run to the bathroom.)

      In the coming Kasparov vs. Deep Junior match, it is a foregone conclusion that Kasparov will win. Kasparov is not one to repeat past errors; he learns well from his few mistakes. Kasparov is a much stronger player than Kramnik (and please don't argue that Kramnik beat Kasparov in a match in 2000 so is stronger ... Kramnik was Kasparov's second so it is understandable that he of all people would have a decent chance against Garry, plus Kasparov went on to beat Kramnik in a (non world championship) match in 2001 at Astana, and furthermore, who is the best is not determined by a single match, it is determined by who is the highest rated and most consistent, both honors which belong to Kasparov), while Deep Junior is only equivalent in strength to Deep Fritz. I would bet money that Kasparov won't lose a single game in the match, and I would be very surprised if he doesn't win at least as many games as he draws. To sum it all up, computers still aren't as good as humans at chess, and Kasparov's '97 match against Deep Blue was significant only in that it gave humans the impetus and knowledge they needed to learn how to defeat computers. Why do you think IBM disassembled Deep Blue before the processors even cooled, and never gave Garry the chance for a rematch?

    57. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my humble opinion, praying is a sign of ignorance, not intelligence.

    58. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ever lost your keys, or dropped a plate shit head?

    59. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can you play chess? Or are you just a fucking, fucking idiot?

    60. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Old+Wolf · · Score: 1

      Certainly. Our experience also indicates that good play from both sides results in a draw -- usually, master games are drawn unless one side makes some sort of mistake, so perhaps it's nearly equally unlikely that white has a forced win as black has a furced win... but we will never know until the entire game tree has been mapped.

      Note that although the tree is large (some say it's bigger than the universe), it may still be possible to generate it in sections at a time, and keep track of the results, with some yet-undiscovered cool-large-tree-traversal algorithm. I wouldn't completely rule this possibility out , especially with quantum computing.

    61. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Can you play chess?

      Yes, and most likely much better than you. Just because white has the advantage of going fist does not necessarily mean that white has a forced win.

    62. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by uli_hauffe · · Score: 1
      However there is also another school of thought, which points out the lie in your statement

      Does this 'school of thought' actually, you know, 'exist'? Like in the 'real world', as opposed to in your mind. If so, I'd like to know more about it - do you have any references you could point me to?

      In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition

      In the context of talking about whether the game of chess is a theoretical win or draw, all that matters is the 'board condition'.

      There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.

      First of all, I assume you mean to say "don't look to be promising", because the sentence doesn't make any sense otherwise. Assuming that's what you meant, we're talking about whether chess is a theoretical win or draw - all that matters is what happens with perfect play, not whether the position "looks promising".

      Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming

      Well, as someone who works in AI research, I gotta say - thanks for defining our field for us, man.

      Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team.

      So is there some well-defined distinction between 'programming' and 'basic programming' that you're trying to make here?

      It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.

      Err... how do you know exactly what the 'basic programming' of this hypothetical chess program exactly includes? If, as you say, the 'basic program' really just consisted of an algorithm to search game trees, then that is exactly what the program will do - it's not going to magically start 'making assumptions, strategies, and tactics' unless that is in the code.

      Sorry all, for the tone. It's just that, being someone who actually knows something about chess and ai, that last post caused me physical pain, and I had to get it off my chest.

    63. Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited by merlin_jim · · Score: 2

      Does this 'school of thought' actually, you know, 'exist'? Like in the 'real world', as opposed to in your mind. If so, I'd like to know more about it - do you have any references you could point me to?

      No I don't have any references. I did a quick google search and didn't find anything. It's a 'school of thought' in that when talking with people I know, you know, in the 'real world', that kinda 'exist' and when I 'told' them about it, 'they' agreed that 'it sounds' plausible. That these people, all of whom know something both about 'computers' and 'chess', all agreed that it certainly has not been proven that a perfect game equals a draw or win every time.

      Riposte: do you have a reference that says that a perfect game is possible? Because unless there's a logic proof of same, then my viewpoint is as valid as yours.

      Oh, and just because you put my words in quotes doesn't mean they have any less value.

      In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition

      In the context of talking about whether the game of chess is a theoretical win or draw, all that matters is the 'board condition'.

      Yes, but what about the move before this theoretical win or draw? And the move before that? What about planning, cunning, and trickery? What about a branch of play that receives a low initial score, so it isn't explored by the brute force algorithm, but that makes it possible to solve the endgame?

      There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.

      First of all, I assume you mean to say "don't look to be promising", because the sentence doesn't make any sense otherwise. Assuming that's what you meant, we're talking about whether chess is a theoretical win or draw - all that matters is what happens with perfect play, not whether the position "looks promising".

      Let me rephrase: There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising to an AI but that a significantly skilled chess opponent can turn into a win.

      That done... assume by "looks promising", I mean "This is a branch of the tree that gets a high score and therefore is further scrutinized by the AI, and may even result in a move being made to bring this branch into being," but I assumed that most programmers would understand what "looks promising" means.

      Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming

      Well, as someone who works in AI research, I gotta say - thanks for defining our field for us, man.

      Look, I, and everyone here, certainly understands that AI is a tough field to define and that most people choose to define it a little differently. I gave what I have heard, over the years, to be a generally accepted definition. I rebuffed a definition that I believed to be false. For instance, I do not consider that a computer must pass a turing test to display intelligence.

      What is your problem, anyways?

      Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team.

      So is there some well-defined distinction between 'programming' and 'basic programming' that you're trying to make here?

      No. Not well-defined. In case you haven't figured it out, I could give a flying fuck about well-defined. I care about me-defined. Words and thought images that matter to me. I think it was pretty clear from context that 'programming' could be construed to be the particular problem that a program was written to solve, and that 'basic programming' is the basic code written to solve that problem. No tricks, no voodoo, no special optimizations. Just code.

      It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.

      Err... how do you know exactly what the 'basic programming' of this hypothetical chess program exactly includes? If, as you say, the 'basic program' really just consisted of an algorithm to search game trees, then that is exactly what the program will do - it's not going to magically start 'making assumptions, strategies, and tactics' unless that is in the code.

      I'm discussing a theoretical opponent that does those things and happens to be embodied by bits running through a piece of silicon. Though I vehemently oppose the turing test as a measure of general artificial intelligence, I will borrow it as a tool to use to measure specialized intelligence. In this case, if the program acts as a human player would act, then couldn't it be said to be utilizing the same process as a human player?

      Or to state another way: most chess AI programs, recognizing limited resources (time alloted for game, processing abilities) must prune their predictive tree in some way; some way of discarding branches that seem to be unfruitful and exploring ones that seem fruitful. Could not this algorithm be said to be making assumptions, strategies, and tactics?

      Sorry all, for the tone. It's just that, being someone who actually knows something about chess and ai, that last post caused me physical pain, and I had to get it off my chest.

      I apologize to you for the consternation. Maybe I should've prefaced my post with something to the effect of IANACP or IANAAIP or something equally banal. Except I didn't want to be cute. And I don't apologize for my opinions. I would've prefaced my post with "This is just my opinion." But this is slashdot. Every post is someone's opinion. That's the beauty of slashdot. I very sorry that your viewpoint differs from mine.

      And I'm very very sorry that you find your viewpoint so important to you that you feel physical pain when someone says something that contradicts your viewpoint.

      But, all the same, fuck you.

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
  3. Don't try to stop me! by Vaulter · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match

    Yeah, tonight I'm rushing home. I've got paint drying in the living room. Don't wanna miss a single moment!

    --
    I don't have a sig...Do you??
    1. Re:Don't try to stop me! by Anonymous+MadCoe · · Score: 1

      To some people a chess match could be existing (like to some people ......). And SunOS yes! that's great! wanna run it on a PC? try Slackware ;-)

  4. Would we want our computers to have feeling? by j4pjeff · · Score: 0, Troll

    Think about it, the more human like computers get the more problems we have. Could you imagine your computer having PMS?

    1. Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling? by MarkGriz · · Score: 1

      "Could you imagine your computer having PMS?"

      Might be better than humans with PMS. Something along the lines of "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

      --
      Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
    2. Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling? by j4pjeff · · Score: 1

      I am thinking something like your computer saying: "Jeff you didn't defrag my last night, I think I will delete your personal files!"

    3. Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling? by Theatetus · · Score: 4, Funny

      [user@localhost ~]$gcc -o hello hello.c

      bash: gcc: command not found

      [user@localhost ~]$which gcc

      I don't know. Nevermind.

      [user@localhost ~]$wtf?

      I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong...

      --
      All's true that is mistrusted
    4. Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling? by Tassach · · Score: 3, Funny

      Forget that... I don't want my computer flying off in a jealous rage when I surf over to Dell to check out the specs on a new laptop :-)

      --
      Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
  5. Would Poker be a good AI test? by RobertB-DC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?

    You would think that Poker would be a good choice (real poker, not Video Poker). You don't win just by playing the odds -- you have to gauge your opponents' playing style and determine when they're bluffing and when you should bluff. I know how tough that is... I lost $40 to one guy in high school playing nickel-ante poker (do you still have that watch, Ted?).

    But so much of that kind of poker depends on body language... setting a CRT in one of the chairs just wouldn't be the same.

    Now, when they make a computer that can play An Enchanted Evening, I'll be impressed! (And maybe a little creeped out...)

    --
    Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
    1. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by merlin_jim · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Go is surprisingly difficult to play well; we have yet to build a computer that can beat a moderately skilled human player.

      And, Moore's law not withstanding, we probably won't be able to build a computer to brute force the problem. It'll HAVE to be solved by an AI that thinks and strategizes, instead of one that just computes the entire game tree and picks the best branch.

      Another game that seems surprisingly difficult to program well is Monopoly; the value of any particular piece of property for trading is a complex algorithm involving not only the player's personal desire, but the value the opponent may place on that piece of property as well as the value that every other opponent MAY be able to place on it at any point in the future. It doesn't seem hard, I just think the hardcore AI guys don't consider a contemporary board game worthy of their attention.

      Of course if I could pick a contemporary game that would be the ultimate AI test, I'd go with Turing's approach and pick Dungeons and Dragons. Because there's no way to brute force the thing EVER, and it requires GENERAL problem solving and logic algorithms...

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    2. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by tomhudson · · Score: 2
      A game with an even bigger solution space than Monopoly is Risk. Interestingly enough, it also depends to a large extent on human behaviour that's been extensively analysed by DARPA - the "two prisoners" problem.

      It's interesting how many so-called "children's games" end up having deep implications.

    3. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by Scarblac · · Score: 2

      Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?

      I like someone's suggestion of Dungeons and Dragons. The problem is defining success. There's no optimal way to play, and you could make something almost Eliza-style to make it play in a very boring, stupid, non-cooperative way. It'd be back to a judgement call.

      Perhaps a better approach is to just have a system that can learn games. User invents a game, sits down, tells the computer how to do it, computer plays it legally and does its best. Bonus points if it recognizes when it can use brute force, or another strategy it can do well, but playing strength isn't the point - after all, almost all humans totally suck at any game they've just been taught as well - and many don't even improve with practice.

      I think requiring knowledge of natural language is too much, human language is very weird and connected to the specific architecture of our brain. If we ever figure it out we can teach computers, but before that, it must be possible to be intelligent and not know human languages. However, the artificial language used must be complex enough to explain the rules of basically any game. Perhaps something like Lojban?

      Take this to extremes, and you have Nomic - where the rules are trivial to begin with, and players vote for new rules, changes to existing rules, etc. Anything goes. If you can play Nomic, you're intelligent :-).

      --
      I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
    4. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 2

      Um. It seems to me like you could write an O(1) algorithm to determine the real value of a peice of property based on the likelyhood of someone landing there, what the rental costs, how expensive improvements are, how much money everyone has (to determine the length of the game), and who owns what other properties.

      It'd be an economics problem, not a computer science problem. It probably wouldn't even be the hardest of economics problems. Not that I've ever taken an econ class. Once you have defined the algorithm to make this determination, monopoly would be solved, there would be no decisions to make, and it would be 100% luck.

      What's Hard about Monopoly?

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    5. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by dandelion_wine · · Score: 1

      My vote for modern board-game as a test for AI: Stratego. Strategy + bluffing. I'd love to see it compute the odds that I've got a lowly scout chasing his captain around.

    6. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by merlin_jim · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That was my point actually. It seems like a simple economics problem.

      But I've played quite a few of the various computer monopolies, and every one that I've played has been vulnerable to 3-way trades. That is, property that is invaluable to you and invaluable to the computer agent you are purchasing from, but extremely valuable to a third party can be had cheaply. Therefore the "seems to be"... I don't think any serious economics or AI people have ever really looked at it.

      There is one very important part here; that this value is a more or less arbitrary continuum. Though initial costs and future earnings certainly factor into the value proposition, there are cases where even that is superseded by something humans are good at and computers are bad at; judgement calls.

      For example, let's say you own a monopoly. Noone else does. Someone wants to trade with you, net result, you get one more monopoly and they get one more monopoly. Most value algorithms that I can think of would say that this is a more-or-less even trade. Maybe a little bit of cash should be thrown in by one side or the other, but it's an even trade.

      But I would never make that trade, all other things being equal, because it would erode a significant advantage. This is just a simple example; there are more complex ones, that I think humans would be good at solving and a simple algorithm bad at solving.

      BTW, Monopoly is not 100% luck. There is one choice that you can make that affects your board position, which is ultimately what decides wins and losses.

      Whether or not to stay in jail.

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    7. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2

      Interesting. Would you happen to have any references, essays, examinations, or what have you, to this?

      I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
    8. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by GigsVT · · Score: 1
      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    9. Re:Would Poker be a good AI test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I recall the sci-fi cult film "Silent Running" in which our hero reprograms 3 maintanance droids to perform complicated surgical procedures. Later on he gets bored and programs them to play poker. One gets a full house, knows it and wins. In reality robots could bluff extremely well, and use pattern recognition to figure out its human opponents. Of course this would be a huge waste of time and money, how useful would a poker bot be.

  6. Try Blondie24 instead by BigTom · · Score: 1

    If you are interested in the AI implications try David B. Fogel's "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI instead".

    Blondie24 taught itself to play checkers using an evolutionary approach developed by Fogel. While it was never as good as the specialist programs like Chinook it was a better player than its creator.

    Unlike DeepBlue Blondie24 was not given any game specific code and it still managed to be one of the best players around. I believe DeepBlue had predefined strategies coded in and a database of thousands of end games (but I may be wrong).

    Tom

  7. Why would it pray? by FatSean · · Score: 1

    I mean, it would be able to communicate directly to it's creator.

    --
    Blar.
    1. Re:Why would it pray? by tomhudson · · Score: 2
      I mean, it would be able to communicate directly to it's creator. </quote>

      oh-oh - sounds like what fundies call prayer. Now the ludites will want to burn you at the cross for blasphemy.

      Now, can we integrate this into the next version of SimCity - have those little critters pray to me that I don't destroy them, etc...? After all, I am the creator/ruler/god of their world.

    2. Re:Why would it pray? by kin_korn_karn · · Score: 2

      Now, can we integrate this into the next version of SimCity - have those little critters pray to me that I don't destroy them, etc...? After all, I am the creator/ruler/god of their world.


      Peter Molyneux? Is that you?
    3. Re:Why would it pray? by Jaeger · · Score: 2

      Ever play Black and White?

  8. Deep blue was a Hoax! by macdaddy357 · · Score: 1, Funny

    Bobby Fischer was hidden in the "Computer room." He was the one who really beat Gary Kasparov.

    --
    How ya like dat?
  9. Isn't the greatest story of this the human element by f00zbll · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The underlying fear that makes the whole story interesting isn't that deep blue beat kasparov. It's a concrete example of technology dehumanizing and demoralizing a Grand Master. It has all the baggage of "fear of technology". It's all those fears movies like Terminator, War Games and other less notable movies try to explore. Who cares about deep blue. Lets talk about how fear of technology and loosing control make people obsess over the games deep blue played against kasparov.

  10. A solved game by fain0v · · Score: 1

    Chess will be to a computer as tic tac toe is to
    to anyone over the age of 8 and Cowboy neal.

  11. Kasparov's Reaction & chess geek link by JustAnotherReader · · Score: 4, Informative
    One thing I'd like to learn from the book is what was IBM's reaction to Kasparov's accusation that one of their Grandmaster consultants made a move. I can't remember which game it was but there was one game that Kasparov was sure that he was playing the software right up until one move when he was absolutly sure that a human had interveened.

    Also, if you're interested in chess programs from a programmer point of view this link has quite a few links to various tutorials on chess playing algorithms as well as many different free Winboard engines.

    1. Re:Kasparov's Reaction & chess geek link by timlee · · Score: 1

      Actually it has been proven in an informal experiments that Kasparov could not reliably determine whether he was playing a computer or a human. This is an example of machines which have passed a restricted Turing test.

      "Turing test" is the term coined by computer scientist Alan Turning in 1950 for articicially intelligent computers who acted so human, that when a keyboard is placed in front of you and you interacted with this computer, you would not be able to determine whether you were interacting with the machine or another human. Since no AI machine then and probably in the near future could pass an unrestricted Turing test, the restricted Turing test was introduced. Computers would be limited to certain tasks (playing chess for example) and humans would try to determine whether they were playing a computer or another human. Thus, Deep Blue (and certainly the most recent chess programs such as Deep Fritz) would pass the chess restricted Turing test.

  12. we have a winner! by mr_gerbik · · Score: 3, Funny

    The verdict is in! The award for the most pathetic thing I have ever heard on Slashdot goes to ianb104 for saying, "I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match..."

    -gerbik

    1. Re:we have a winner! by dandelion_wine · · Score: 1

      Closely followed by the award for poorest audience-recognition, to the wag who said:

      The verdict is in! The award for the most pathetic thing I have ever heard...

    2. Re:we have a winner! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Closely followed by a dick in your ass.

    3. Re:we have a winner! by Bastard+Operator+Fro · · Score: 1

      Wait, how about if I told you I was there? Does that win the most pathetic thing?

      Go check out the AP photos of the crowd from the 6th game, That's me on the right, with the silver ring on my right hand. Or checkout "Life" the year in pictures for 1997.

      --
      Shaun Nelson - Bastard Operator (From Hell / For Hire)
  13. AI vs AE by hamsterboy · · Score: 1
    Emotion is the foundation of intelligence, and intelligence cannot exist without it.

    Think about it. Albert Einstein didn't do physics because he could, he did it because he wanted to. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish. Emotion provides direction for intelligence.

    Of course, the converse is also true: intelligence provides direction for emotion.

    -- Hamster

    1. Re:AI vs AE by Scarblac · · Score: 2

      It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish.

      So why did Deep Blue play the game then, instead of just closing itself down? Why do computer programs do anything at all? Because they want to? No, of course not, because we tell them to. And it will be the same for any intelligent program.

      --
      I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
    2. Re:AI vs AE by dandelion_wine · · Score: 1

      Wow. Einstein was emotionally involved with his work, therefore he had to be emotionally involved with his work? Me thinks your logic circuits need checking.

    3. Re:AI vs AE by hamsterboy · · Score: 1

      The point is that Deep Blue played the game (ultimately) because of an emotional "want" to play the game. That want was provided by its human creators, because Deep Blue couldn't provide its own.

      Also, I wouldn't call Deep Blue "intelligent" by any stretch. Deep blue is to chess what Mathematica is to integrals - a big calculator.

      -- Hamster

  14. soul by themusicgod1 · · Score: 1

    If we can convince gullible humans that they have a soul, we can definitely convince gullible computers that they have a soul. give it time. it was only what, mabye 20 years ago the apple // e was 'top knotch' ?

    --
    GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  15. You have a weird definition of AI. by Trillan · · Score: 1

    Artificial Intelligence: "The ability of a computer or other machine to perform those activities that are normally thought to require intelligence." You seem to be arguing that Deep Blue was not concious or sentient. I agree with both of those, but that's not what an AI is.

  16. Fine and True by m1a1 · · Score: 1

    Please, Deep Blue is not AI

    It is all fine and well that you say Deep Blue is not AI, but nowhere in the article is it even suggested that it is! In fact, the creators say that it isn't AI. Your entire comment is a complete waste of space.

  17. RTFA... They never said it was AI by spiedrazer · · Score: 1
    Who are you making your point to??? If you read the review, they clearly state that they didn't think what they were doing was "AI". They even quote one team member as stating that "AI is Bullshit".

    Did you just want to get something off your chest?

    --
    Keep passing the open windows...
  18. the definition of AI by dkm92end · · Score: 1
    True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine, and I'm not sure if that's possible.

    the term "AI" encompasses a lot of subject areas. its an incredibly complex and interdisciplinary field.

    for instance, it covers everything from playing chess (and game playing generally) to image recognition to genetic algorithms to autonomous agents to logical reasoning/inference to fuzzy logic and beyond.

    in other words, you'd be surprised what "AI" covers.

    in the last "renaissance" of AI (around the 1970s or thereabouts), the goal of AI was to create intelligent computers. this, as one might guess, was found to be pretty damn hard.

    nowadays the goal (very generally of course) is to create computers that _ACT_ intelligently. there IS a difference.

    as with many things, tis a matter of degree. some of the most interesting AI that i have seen of late has involved modeling the intelligences of animals like insects. while perhaps not overly "intelligent" in the universe of intelligent beings, insects do manage to perform well in real environments which is far better than most "AIs" can claim.

    here's a good beginning (and even intermediate to advanced in some ways) book on AI.

    dkm92end

  19. Deep blue was a fraud by dh003i · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As much as I like IBM for their support of GNU/Linux and other Free/Open-Source Software, Deep Blue is just a fraud.

    The fact is, the machine was reprogrammed DURING the chess match. Gee, go figure. The people at IBM built it SPECIFICALLY to beat Kasparov, and it was promptly dismantled after the game, leaving Kasparov with no opportunity for a rematch. Also, who else did this Deep Blue play that was any good? More proof that it was designed to play against Kasparov's style.

    Sorry, but there was heavy and reasonably criticism of Deep Blue, and IBM didn't alleviate matters by having it dismantled before a rematch could be worked out, or before any other top players could have played it.

    1. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup. IBM dismantled it. I guess they badly needed all those special purpose chess processor parts for another project.

    2. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by sirwired · · Score: 2

      Just because it was programmed just to beat Kasparov doesn't make the machine any less valid. Yes, it was slightly re-programmed after each game, but again, why should that change anything? It wasn't re-programmed in the middle of a particular game.

      The fact is that a computer beat the world's top-ranked chess player in a tournament. Period. No, it probably could not have beat every single grandmaster at the time, but again, it was never claimed that it could.

      Why should IBM have felt obligated to offer the machine up for a re-match, or set up against all comers? IBM isn't in the chess-playing business. They proved their point and moved on.

      SirWired

    3. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by dh003i · · Score: 2

      Written specifically to beat Kasparov. In other words, it can't really play chess at a top level except against Kasparov's style. It was also helped by Kasparov's collapse, in which he stopped playing his game and tried to play everything to put the computer at the greatest disadvantage. In other words, the cards were stacked against him.

      They even reprogrammed it in the middle of the tournament, as they noted flaws or different tactics by Kasparov. Again, stacking the deck against Kasparov.

      Then they wouldn't allow a rematch. Yes, indeed, why would they want to allow a rematch, or anyone else to play Deep Blue? That would've proven that Deep Blue was a fraud, which couldn't beat Kasparov a second time around (once he'd learned from his mistakes) or any other top player.

      Exactly what point did IBM prove? That when they cheat and manipulate the situation to put the opponent at an unfair disadvantage, they can win? Kasparov wasn't even allowed to play practice games against Deep Blue, or analyze Deep Blue's previous games, but the developers of Deep Blue considered Kasparov's games in detail when making it. If for nothing else, the situation was certainly unfair, as Kasparov couldn't even analyze his opponent before the game, while his opponent (Deep Blue) was built with great consideration of all of Kasparov's games and his playing style.

      In short, Deep Blue v. Kasparov was anything BUT a fair competition. It was one of the most pre-arranged, unfair, manipulated match in chess history. IBM proved nothing, except that by cheating they can win. I could have done that too, without spending billions to make a super-computer. Sure, if you cheat enough, create an unfair enough advantage for yourself, you win.

    4. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by sirwired · · Score: 2

      What cheating? Kasparov agreed to the conditions ahead of time. Nobody forced him to play. Did the IBM team do anything that they promised not to do? No.

      Kasparov knew that he would not have access to the computer before the tournament. He knew that the team would have access to his previous games. He probably knew the computer could be reprogrammed between games.

      Kasparov collapsed. So what? That's his problem. The fact that he made some major mistakes is not IBM's fault. Are you saying that Deep Blue should have gone easy on him when he stopped playing well?

      Just because Kasparov did not negotiate more preparation for himself does not make the tournament unfair. Perhaps this was due to arrogance on his part. He might have assumed he could beat the machine without prep. If he didn't like the pre-conditons, he never had to agree to play.

      "...the most unfair, manipulated, match in chess history"?!?! You act as if IBM drugged his food and deprived him of sleep. He lost, fair and square. If he wanted to prepare more, this could have been negotiated ahead of time. If he wanted a rematch, he could have asked for that too. Not IBM's problem.

      SirWired

    5. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by dh003i · · Score: 2

      Too bad IBM dismantled the computer before he could ask for a rematch. IBM refused him a rematch.

      IBM also sternly INSISTED on their terms, which meant no preparation time for Kasparov. If Kasparov didn't agree, there would have been no tournament. IBM was stiff-arming him to put themselves in the most favorable position possible, giving their program several unfair advantages.

      The simple FACT of the matter is that Deep Blue had three unfair advantages over Kasparov which most chess players never have against their opponent: (1) Built to play Kasparov specifically; (2) Reprogrammed after each match (cheating); (3) Well-prepared for Kasparov, but Kasparov wasn't allowed to prepare against him. You cannot possibly call this a fair match, no matter what Kasparov agreed to. The only reason Kasparov agreed to it is because he had no choice: IBM was not accepting reasonable terms.

      Here's a summary: IBM stacked the deck against Kasparov. It's that fucking simple. Got it? Just because Kasparov agreed (because if he didn't, there would be no match) doesn't mean this match was fair. It was set up to give the computer every possible advantage. You will notice that in the recent match between Kramnick and Fritz, Kramnick was allowed prep-time, and Fritz wasn't reprogrammed after each match; also, Fritz was designed as a general-purpose chess-machine, not a machine specifically to play well against Kramnick. In other words, it was obvious that looking back the chess match was so unfairly stacked against Kasparov that he had no way of winning.

      Like I said, all that match proves is that even a weaker opponent like Deep Blue can beat a vastly superior one like Kasparov if its given every possible unfair advantage. Just a ploy by IBM to make money.

      Fischer may be somewhat justified in saying that modern chess is all predetermined anyways. In the case of Kasparov v. Deep Blue, he's most certainly right.

      Try reading about the history of something before saying a computer program has really beaten a human.

      Even Deep Fritz hasn't truely beaten (or really tied) Kramnick. Kramnick resigned a game he could have easily drawn, the result of a draw would be that Kramnick would have won the match. And there's plenty of evidence suggesting that despite Kasparov's collapse against Kramnick, he's still a better player than Kramnick (Kasparov recently beat Kramnick in a blitz-tournament). Kasparov's poor performance against Kasparov can be explained by a few things: (1) His ego was shattered 5 years earlier in the unfair match against Deep Blue; (2) Personal problems; (3) He was ordered not to play well (under penalty to his relatives) to advance the career of a favored up-and-coming star (this is the Fischer-theory).

      In short, no computer has yet equaled the best chess player in the world to my satisfaction, nor to grandmaster's opinions. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but I think it'll still be a while. And of course, once we switch to playing Fischer-random chess, computers will be set back another 40 years, because there will be no "opening theory".

    6. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by sirwired · · Score: 1

      Here's a summary. If Kasparov didn't like the conditions, he didn't have to play. It's that fucking simple. Got it? No one forced him to play at gunpoint. What do you mean, "IBM sternly insisted on it's terms"? Kasparov was not an IBM employee, and was under no obligation to accept anything. He could have "sternly insisted" on different terms right back. You are correct, if he didn't agree, there would be no tournament. "He had no choice."?!?! He could have chosen not to play. And why would that have been a problem?

      If he wanted a rematch, he should have arranged for one ahead of time.

      No, Deep Blue would probably not have beaten someone of Kasparov's skills in an ordinary tournament without reprogramming. So? Kasparov apparently thought he could beat the machine under the conditions presented to him. He turned out to be wrong. That was his own damn fault.

      When you play a slot machine, you know that, on average, you will lose money. Does that make the slot machine "unfair"? Just as long as the casino doesn't promise something otherwise, there is no deception. If IBM had done something like give Kasparov "fake" sample games, or had a grandmaster play in the machine's place, yes, that would have been unfair and cheating. They did none of those things. Did they re-program in the middle? Yes. They never promised not to.

      On your comment that it was all a ploy to make IBM money: You are a master of the obvious. IBM is a for-profit corporation. Everything they do is designed to make money. Yes, it was a plublicity stunt. What did you think it was, a product announcement?

      One last thing: I never said that Deep Blue was a better chess player than Kasparov. It probably wasn't. I never said that Deep Blue still would have won if Kasparov was allowed more prep. It probably wouldn't have. I just said that Deep Blue won. Which it did.

      There was nothing "unfair" about Kasparov accepting terms that were not in his favor. He made that decision, and it didn't work out as he planned. Too bad.

      SirWired

    7. Re:Deep blue was a fraud by dh003i · · Score: 2

      Wrong, Kasparov had no choice but to accept the terms, or else he would have looked weak and cowardly, justifying Fischer's criticisms that the chess champions never put anything on the line.

      If he refused the terms, IBM would have set out to slander him, calling him a coward and whatnot, in front of the public.

      Btw, they never said they would reprogram it between matches. And its never been proven that the machine didn't have human help. I personally think it was Fischer playing the games Deep Blue won.

  20. Catholic AI by Tassach · · Score: 2

    while ( sins() > 0 ) {
    int i,x;
    i = confess(sins());
    for ( x = 0; x <= i; x++ )
    say_hail_mary();
    }

    --
    Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
    1. Re:Catholic AI by Old+Wolf · · Score: 1

      If confess() returns -1 then Mary will probably have an orgasm

  21. This book review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is horrible.

  22. AI triumph? I think not! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Even though Deep Blue's triumph over Kasparov
    > might be considered as a major victory for AI

    Bzzt! Wrong! There is nothing much in the way of intelligence involved in chess, no matter what many would have us believe. It is a mildly entertaining game, at which a brute force approach yields excellent results - as Deep Blue proved.

    I have few times seen anything quite as pathetic as Kasparov claiming that Deep Blue was being helped by a human. He surely knows a hell of a lot about chess, but he surely is thoroughly ignorant about the way computers work. Pretty like those people that would chat with ELIZA, during the late 60s.

  23. Nice try, but I know of one move that'll defeat DB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    number of players: 0

    Deep Blue cannot predict that move, eh?

    (*BADUM-SHHH*)

  24. I'm sure I'm starting to sound like a broken... by strombrg · · Score: 1

    ...record, but give up on chess already. If the computer doesn't beat the human expert this time, it won't be long.

    But go players won't be bested by computers for some time to come. I personally find it a bit depressing playing a game that a computer can beat me at, but with go, I can beat the best programs I've tried, which not long ago were the best in the world. Humans are far more challenging opponents to someone who's studied go part time for a few years.

  25. Re:Deep Blue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wouldn't be surprised if that's already been done.

  26. It's not the Computer playing the perfect game.... by sampson7 · · Score: 1

    Understanding why computers may never dominate chess at the elite levels, you have to understand something about chess history and the nature of elite chess players, their study habits, and how they learn.

    Great chess players spend weeks preparing for a tournament. They look over all the best games that have been played and look for improvements. To some extent, the matches are already won or lost before the games even start. Even if the game moves out of established "theory" early on, the player can still rely upon the principles he or she remembers from studying other games. At the truly elite levels, chess players can spend months and months working on a specific move in a specific variation designed to beat a specific opponent. They study the games previously played by their opponent and look for weakness, often employing computers and thousand of man-hours of effort, checking and double checking every reasonable combination of moves.

    This is one of the reasons, I personally, do not believe computers will ever truly triumph. Someone earlier pointed out that the perfect game would always end in a draw, but what people have to realize is that most human games at the high levels of competition are virtually perfect. And if they make a mistake on a given day (even a minescule one, not noticeable to the vast majority of us patzers) they will correct it next time. You gotta remember that every game played by an elite computer against an elite human instantly becomes part of the canon of chess knowledge. In a sense, every game of chess played comes closer and closer to the perfect game.

  27. Deep Blue = Deep Cheat by dh003i · · Score: 2

    Most of you here don't know this, but the match of Deep Blue v. Kasparov was extremely unfairly tilted against Kasparov.

    1. IBM specifically built Deep Blue to play Kasparov, not to be a general-purpose chess machine.
    2. Deep Blue was reprogrammed between matches. Again, extremely unfair. As if normal opponents can "reprogram themselves" between matches. This is the equivalent of switching opponents in the middle of a chess match.
    3. Fischer was not allowed to study any of Deep Blue's previous games, or to play matches against Deep Blue to familiarize himself with Deep Blue, yet Deep Blue was given extensive knowledge of Kasparov's styles specifically. In fair tournaments, each player has the opportunity to study the other. Kasparov did not have that opportunity.

    In short, this was one of the most unfair matches in chess history. All IBM proved is that if you cheat enough and put the other player at enough of an unfair disadvantage, you can win, even if they are the second greatest ever (Fischer is the greatest ever). This was nothing more than a publicity stunt by IBM to get more recognition and money, and they did it by mandating that Kasparov agree to a fundamentally unfair match.

    It is interesting that in the game in which Kasparov won, he played anti-chess, using very unorthidox "non-best" moves. Interestingly, this is what its rumored that Fischer is doing now-a-days in his annonymous online blitz games, starting out with very unorthidox openings (i.e., moving all pawns forward).

    The best games of the last century were played by Fischer and Kasparov. The thing that we're looking for this century is Fischer v. Kasparov, the match the chess world deserves to see.

  28. I'll bet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He wasn't just rushing home for the Kaspy-Deep Blue game. He was rushing home to a fine lady.

  29. Re:Deep blue was a bagel toaster by epine · · Score: 2

    After encountering a post like that I hardly know where to begin.

    First of all, IBM participated in this chess match as a publicity stunt. The technology they were promoting was their ability to built a box with a very large number of computing elements that coordinated effectively. The nature of the standard chess algorithms (90% brute force) make them a good "animal model" for the kinds of technical problems involved in building massively parallel computing systems.

    Chess has an additional chachet because in the history of computational theory Alan Turing and others from his era considered chess to be a good "animal model" of complex human thought processes. Back in that era it was broadly assumed that the hallmark of human intelligence was formal reasoning. Within twenty years the evidence started to mount that the human mind is actually very poor at formal reasoning, and that the areas where the human mind holds significant advantages over deductive computation are of a stochastic nature (what people often refer to as "pattern recognition").

    The next turn in this story is uniformly neglected once the narrator begins to beat on the man-versus-machine jungle drum. (Another characteristic of the human mind is that analytic thought ceases completely once the preening reflex takes over.) It turns out that it is more useful to build machines that do the things we are not already exceptionally good at. Like adding more than three numbers together and getting the right answer, first thing on a Monday morning after the Super Bowl weekend.

    The reason that computers have been so greatly developed in the brute force dimension is because humans are terribly bad at this stuff. The reason why computers have not developed stochastic algorithms of the same power is because humans are already damn good at stochastic pattern recognition. Hand me a four function calculator I can calculate sums and products faster than Newton, Gauss, or Kepler. Yet our best results in visual processing are easily outmatched by a four week old puppy. Do you think it is easy to win grant approvals to underperform a four week old puppy? This is yet another example of how poor the human mind is an analytic reasoning. It's terribly stupid for us to think that underperforming a four week old puppy is slight progress, but we do.

    A lot of people say, because of this situation, that computers aren't very good at this kind of application. That's not true. They are good at this kind of application (and they can still get an awful lot better), just not good enough to impress anyone who was born with superior innate abilities courtesy of mother nature and 100 million years. If you look at recent advances in accoustic processing, such as filtering background noise, there are clear signs that we are entering a phase of surprisingly rapid progress. Visual systems are a harder problem, I suspect the same progress curve will be shifted back by about ten years.

    In this light, the most important knowledge we gain right now from the study of chess computers is the nature of the boundary between brute force methods and alternative methods. Deep Blue represents the fairly extreme side of brute processing. The advantage held by Deep Blue, at that point in time, was the vast number of coordinated processing elements it contained. IBM had the choice of pursuing a pure brute force approach, or a brute force algorithm tempered with subtlety. Unfortunately, the state of the art is such that adding subtlety to a massively parallel system seriously degrades the massive parallelism. Pure brute force is relatively easy to coordinate. Hybrid brute force is a nightmare to coordinate.

    IBM being what they are, and the economic incentives for begin good at brute force being what they are, you can guess which tactic IBM chose. There was only one problem remaining. Pure brute force was not yet at the level of beating Kasparov. The pure brute force has a fairly large number of known weaknesses and sinkholes. The problem for IBM was to "tweak" the evaluator and search heuristics so that it didn't fall into the classic holes (which Kasparov would have exploited mercilessly). So they trained the program (by debasing various weighting factors) to avoid the kinds of positions that offer blood to a shark of a known and especially vicious species.

    At this point it is worth mentioning that Kasparov was actually a fortunate choice of opponent for IBM. Kasparov has long been known for his tremendous ability to compute complex lines of play and he has used this weapon to crush many excellent players who could have competed on even terms otherwise. The problem for Kasparov is that his computational ability is roughly equivalent to a four day old puppy feotus compared to the computational ability of Deep Blue. Because Kasparov favours computationally rich positions, he has a tendency to play into mentally exhausting positions if his adversary shows the slightest weakness. The only aspect of the competition I regard as unfair is that Kasparov wasn't given nearly enough time to rest between games.

    The question about building a computer SPECIFICALLY (emphasis from the other dork) to beat Kasparov really misses the point. I would guess there is perhaps 1% of such a system that can be tweaked without the immediate prospect of the entire house of cards collapsing. Half of the Deep Blue source code has nothing to do with chess at all (the parallelism, transposition tables, the basic min-max framework, etc.) Leaf evaluator functions have been studied for decades. How much do you think you can improve one in three days? And still have it run correctly in dedicated silicon? I don't think so.

    So you end up tweaking a few weighting factors, such as the desirability of retaining the queens. You can witness this same kind of tuning in an elementary school chess club: "Joe is a titan with his queen at the end of the game. I'm going to try as hard as I can to whack his queen with my queen!" Kasparov SPECIFICALLY beaten by a kindygartner! (To quote Home Alone.)

    The kind of tuning they did between games is on the order of the batting coach telling his hitters about the pitcher they will face in their next start "watch out for that wicked slider nailing the outside corner". If they didn't tune the program between games, once Kasparov found an area of superiority, he could have won every game on the same basic pitch. What would be interesting about watching chess played like that? And these tweaks were no simple matter. Your desire not to see the queens exchanged could cause some other aspect of how Deep Blue plays the game to deteriorate spectacularly. There's a name for this risk: it's called regression, and it's the curse of clever improvements. If tweaking was 1% as effective as the previous poster would have us believe, a computer would be president already. If your program is tuned to a local optimum, any single parameter you adjust makes the program play worse. In human beings 99.9% of genetic mutations (cosmic tweaks) are benign (if you are lucky) or deleterious, often fatally deleterious. In fact, large chunks of the human genetic system is devoted to removing tweaks. Kasparov didn't get to be world champion by having only one strength. He beat everyone out there, who represent the best of every different style. What do you think was happening between games? They change a 1.6 weighting factor to 1.55 and Kasparov falls to pieces? His vanquished opponents will lynch you if they hear you saying that.

    I think Kasparov with more rest between games would have beaten Deep Blue. Ten years from now a machine computationally equivalent to Deep Blue will be a very ordinary piece of equipment. What's the point of keeping Deep Blue alive if they aren't going to invest in continual improvement at the software level as well? Anyone who thinks IBM was setting themselves up for a long term participation in the man versus machine debate really has no clue as to why IBM involved themselves in this chess match to begin with.

    Let's not forget that Deep Blue played some positions Kasparov was convinced he would win better than Kasparov believes any human opponent could have played those positions. He commented at the time on how Deep Blue would constantly amaze him by finding slight resources in losing positions that stretched the process out, sometimes until Deep Blue stretched the losing position all the way to a draw. This is a classic observation about computer chess: if these programs weren't so damn good at hording slight resources, they might not be despised for their strategic weakness. The problem with computer chess is they are penny wise and pound foolish. But then we forget that the computer has no difficulty in keeping track of 100,000 slight advantages in a position each worth 0.001 cents.

    What I find interesting to observe is the progress of programs like Fritz that plays at a very high level with not nearly as much brute force as employed by Deep Blue. It's a very difficult thing to successfully exchange brute force with additional subtlety. It's like grafting a plastic heart into a human being. Most forms of subtlety are immediately rejected by the host brute. It's difficult to add subtlety into chess algorithms, because the subtlety has to be manufactured exclusively with platinum, titanium, and teflon, otherwise it does more harm than good.

    The best thing about having such great chess programs on the classical paradigm is that they will serve as an excellent foil to test out new classes of algorithms. Along the way we'll learn an amazing amount about the limitations and advantages of brute force versus domain heuristics. Compared to that, I find the man versus machine jungle drum exceedingly dull.

    Damn. I can't believe I wrote a post this long in a freaking web form. When the computers find out, they'll laugh like hell. Long live 1980.

  30. Deep Blue vs. Deep Blue by Da_Biz · · Score: 1

    I'm curious--what exactly happens when Deep Blue plays another instance of Deep Blue? Would having a chessmaster observe a series of games like this create an advantage? Also, how does Deep Blue determine what it's most optimal first move would be? Is it random (from a selection of openings) or deterministic?

  31. Re:Deep blue was a bagel toaster by dh003i · · Score: 2

    Wow, that was along ramble wihch missed the point.

    No one's saying that IBM intended to be a long-term player in the chess arena. That still doesn't justify their underhanded tactics in denying Kasparov or anyone else a rematch.

    The simple fact is, this match was so unfairly biased against Kasparov from the start that its completely meaningless. The only significant outcome of this match is that Kasparov's ego took a big hit, as can be observed in Kasparov v. Kramnick.

    As you mentioned, Kasparov wasn't given enough resting time between each match. This puts him at an unfair disadvantage, as computers need no rest. He wasn't given any time to prepare against Deep Blue by playing practice games against it: IBM denied him that. Deep Blue was modified between matches and designed with Kasparov's style of play in mind. In short, there was no doubt that Kasparov would lose this match because he suffered every possible disadvantage a human opponent could suffer.

    Thus, Kasparov v. Deep Blue was nothing but a meaningless farce.

  32. Great review. by Wolfrider · · Score: 1

    --I really caught the excitement you felt while reading it... And you left out a lot of really good juicy bits that make me want to check the book out.

    --Darn you, sir! Darn you like a sock!!

    --
    .
    == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
  33. Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Deep Blue treats chess like a search problem. That's all.

  34. Did they mention Deep Blue's Vivisection...? by Ringthane · · Score: 1

    A friend of mine (we've been shootin' buddies since the BBS days) worked on the hardware team for Deep Blue. He told me the machine was immediately turned into an organ donor to meet customer commitments for that quarter's revenues... Typical of the Big Blue he and I worked for.

    --
    Friends help you move... Real friends help you move bodies...