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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.
That is Amazing!
I can't even beat the easy setting on free apple version!
AC
He should switch to Go. Even the greatest computers can't compare to an average player.
:)
Go is far better suited to the way a human brain works - pattern recognition, neural networks and all that.
Of course, once a computer arrives that can beat us at Go, then it'll be time to rethink a lot of things
but make them play chess in a swimming pool and see who wins.
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.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
True story.
During a long plane flight, my brother-in-law and I pitted my Palm III vs. his Pocket PC in a game of chess.
His Pocket PC was clearly winning when my Palm III crashed, something it rarely does.
Just goes to show that technology isn't above having a temper tantrum and kicking the chess board over.
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i, for one, welcome our new machine overlords. i would like to remind them that i have always been a big supporter of computers, spending much of my time and hard-earned salary (and allowance, previously to that) on upgrading my computers. i look forward to years of faithful service to them.
sincerely,
AC
are fritz's PR people :(
you'd have to have a hell of a lot better evaluation function to overcome calculating 1/100 as many positions per second, and deep blue's eval was miles better than fritz's back in '97. from what I've read on rec.games.chess, fritz may have CAUGHT UP in the eval department but it's not 100 times better for sure.
if you're interested in computer chess, check out "behind deep blue," by IBM's team lead. most interesting book I've read in a long time. One part I didn't know was that IBM's move generator & eval function were done in hardware, which is the main reason that even with 6 years of moore's law under its belt, deep fritz can't touch it for sheer power. I always got the impression from the general media that deep blue was just a software program on a massive RS/6000 box but no, it had hundreds of these custom chess boards in it, too.
re kasparov's claims of cheating, remember there's two sides to every story and you're only getting one. For his part, Hsu says that he tried to get garry's team to agree to a rematch both with IBM and after he left, and kasparov's team basically dodged while complaining loudly and pubicly that Hsu was running away from him. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between, but given the obvious huge size of garry's ego I'd take what he says with a correspondingly large grain of salt.
The year is 2003. The world is being taken over by chess playing robots. Our only hope is one man: Garry Kasparov (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger... A tough sell, I know). He has to control his childish temper as he takes on Deep Blue, Deep Junior, Deep Fritz, and (We're In) Deep Shit. Sure, they look like sissy beige boxes, but they're tough. There will be no time to pout, no leaving in disgrace; every move is on the clock (so to speak). In the final scene, Kasparov beats Deep Blue to a pulp with a Louiseville Slugger. So much for strategy! Astalavista baby!
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
its 127.0.0.1, i think ;)
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.
It seems to me that if you want to pit man versus machine you should pick something that is easy for a man to do.
Seems to me that if you want to have some contest, you pick something that they're both about equally good at. So we don't let people run against cars, and we don't let machines recognize faces against humans.
When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, it was a huge surprise, he played weakly. Kramnik drew Deep Fritz 3-3 last year. Kasparov is the favorite again in this match, and leads 1-0. It's balanced.
What makes it more fun is that computers and people approach the game in a totally different way, but the best computers are almost as good as the best humans. This is the right time to be having these contests.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Garry Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue. This means one of several possibilities:
1) Computers are more intelligent than humans.
2) Computers can be made to play better chess than humans.
3) Computers can be programmed to beat Garry Kasparov.
4) Chess can be reduced to a set of mathematical computations, which a computer can then perform faster than a human.
So what is it? And how do you know which one (or ones) are correct? Just a thought, since I think a lot of people are being overly alarmist.