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Humankind Makes Last Stand Against Machine
MrZeebo writes "According to this Financial Times story, Garry Kasparov has begun another match against a computer chess program on Sunday, this time playing against the Israeli-developed Deep Junior. Kasparov is the highest-rated chess player of all time, and lost to Deep Blue in 1997. According to the article, Deep Junior, despite evaluating less moves per minute than Deep Blue, is considered to be a superior chess player. The match will span 6 games, the last one being February 7th." Kasparov has won the first game.
This is not a match between man and machine. It is a match between humans - the human chess player vs the human software programmer. Please keep that in perspective.
Just because my desk calculator performs multiplications faster than me, doesn't mean that it is better at mathematics than I am.
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Chess is hardly a game of intelligence, but rather a game of experience. Computers with only thousands of times the capability of humans beat our mere collection of grey cells simply because we're more experienced. A game is a single event forever to be forgetten by a computer whereas for humans it is a learning experiences with energies to be drawn in the future.
Now if we really want to a game to see if computers are capable of ever besting us, I propose a game of "truth or dare". The only winner is the one least embarrassed. Once they can beat a human at this, I forfiet my humanity.
It's easily possible to write a program that plays a game better than the programmer; in fact, this very thing happened early on in the history of computers that play games (in this case, checkers).
I guarantee you that Deep Blue and Deep Junior play chess better than their programmers, and for that matter, almost everyone on earth. That's why they get to play Kasparov.
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This question is being discussed every time machine plays against grandmaster. Definitive answer is white. That one tempo makes (very often) all the difference when opponents are of the same/similar strength (in chess terms).
to put this another way, if the contest were to factor 20 digt numbers, no one woul dbe surprised if the machine beat a human. it would be a stupid test. Just like chess.
a better test would be a face recognition contest. Or if we need to make it a real game then how about soccer?
another interesting thing to note is that 50 years ago, people thought chess was a pretty damn good test of AI. now people think otherwise. when the computer recognizes faces better than you, plays soccer better than you, writes poetry better than you, steals your girlfriend, and passes the turing test, will you still think its just "following the rules"? your brain is just following the rules of physics too you know.
Ok mod me troll -1 all you want, but I also want to file a complaint with slashdot. I typed up a really nice summary of this story with links about a week ago when it would be actually relevant so people could watch it (instead of posting it AFTER the first game) and of course got rejected. Losing more and more faith in /. ... (and i have been here a very long time)
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On the contrary, chess is an excellent test of man versus machine. It is interesting precisely because champion chess players are not human calculating machines. At each turn, Kasparov chooses from only a handful of possible moves. He uses his brain, and with it some process which we can currently only dream of implementing in a computer, to find those "good" moves. When or if the day arrives that we can emulate this process on a machine, there will no longer be a contest worthy of our attention or consideration. But until then, there is a sporting game to be played.
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Actually, it's all intellect, something the computer doesn't have as it can only do stupid calculations. It's rationality that creeps in. The computer has to calculate all kinds of moves, but Kasparov doesn't even have to consider them because he knows they don't make sense in this position.
Human grandmasters go heavily on pattern recognition. They have on the order of 100,000 types of positions with typical plans memorized, as well as many many tactical patterns. Given a position, they know what both sides should be trying to do. Computers can't do pattern recognition well, so they can't use that method.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
That's why more and more sophisticated heuristics are researched. If it were all about brute force, then people like you and me could code up a chess-playing program capable of going toe-to-toe with Deep Blue in a day or two. But they can't. There's a reason why nobody in my AI class could make their Checkers program beat Chinook at the highest difficulty setting, despite Chinook being only a fraction of its computing power in actual tournaments.
Making an underpowered machine perform as well as a more powerful machine is perhaps the definition of finesse.
Wow, slashdot articles with titles deserving of tabloid magazines?
It's more specifically a test between a slow heuristically based massively parralel computer and a fast serial rule-based weighted system. (simplified, yes I know.)
A computer can count faster then we can, but then we can build 3D representations of objects and spaces just by looking at them, and then traverse them effeciently (aka walking)
If it's games we want to make the battlefield, why not just toss chess and get a propper game... for instance Go. Computers still have some time to go before they can really compete on dan level...
This thread is absurd.
Talking about that...
:)
I was really annoyed by that episode where data played that guy at some logic game.
Data lost, and couldn't understand why. He (rightfully) came to the conclusion that it was a fault with his logic systems.
However the crew viewed this as 'sulking'. (What do you call it when you project human emotions on to other things, when the human emotions don't really exist?)
Data _should_- have either won or known that the game was one of chance, so he had a chance of winning, or known that it was too complex for him to analyse the whole situation and so could only give a best-effort try anyway.
There's quite a few episodes that I'm angry at like that..
although I'm willing to bet the NEC Earth Simulator is powerful enough to precompute every possible game, given enough time
I'm pretty sure it's not. Particles in the universe and picoseconds since the big bang come to mind.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Sometimes, it seems like no one is trying to understand each other here.
What Fizzol is trying to say, I think, is that Kasparov has a lookup table (of sorts) that he uses to determine what are possible good moves for any board state.
Admit it, if a program (the opening and end game of beginners is a good example) used a lookup table to determine its move, you wouldn't call that calculating, would you? At best, you might say, instead, that the move was pre-calculated...