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.

Comments

NO

[teetam]

I have posted this before, but was unfortunately modded down, so bere is go again.

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.

Re:NO

[dstone]

This is not a match between man and machine. It is a match between humans - the human chess player vs the human software programmer.

I disagree with you, since I could apply your reasoning and conclude that this is NOT Kasparov competing either. It is Kasparov's school teachers, nutritionists, chess instructors, fellow chess players, parents, programmers of software that Kasparov uses to train with, and authors of chess books that he no doubt assimilates knowledge from.

My point is that computer algorithms aren't the only thing shaped by the contributions and knowledge of others.

Both Kasparov and Deep Junior are "black boxes" with a recognized I/O protocol for playing chess. One box is made of meat and one is made of hardware/software. Neither box is created itself without huge amounts of guidance, programming, critiquing, iterative refinements, constant tweaking of strategies, etc.

Yes.

[pb]

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.

Re:A different test: man versus machine

[PissedOffGuy]

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.

Re:A different test: man versus machine

[Zork the Almighty]

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.

Re:how can kasparov win?

[Scarblac]

... Kasparov doesn't play solely on raw intellect. Gut instinct and that hint of irrationality creeps in.

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.