Humans Hold Off the Machines... For Now

Murr writes "The six game match between Gary Kasparov and the Deep Junior program ended in a draw today. Kasparov won game 1 and lost game 3 to a blunder, while the other 4 games were drawn. While the quality of play was not outstanding, after the recent matches of Kramnik and Kasparov against commercial programs running on (high end) commodity hardware, it's becoming apparent that chess programs are getting quite competitive with top human players."

Comments

Reason for the draw.

[Rewtie]

I watched this last night on ESPN or ESPN2.

The reason Kasparov gave for the match, and the championship ending in a draw was that it was better to draw than to lose.

He claimed that while a human player would have the memories of past moves and past games to deal with, the computer would not. The computer simply makes the 'best' move for the given situation, and then waits to do the same thing again. The human player would consider moves he/she made in the past, compare the situation to others they may have had, second-guess the moves they might have made, and so forth.

It was interesting to see Kasparov attack, and then ask for a draw (which was denied) and then, two moves later, end the game in a draw.

mandatory go plug

[dollargonzo]

chess is nice, but most progresses in chess have been due to speed increases in hardware and optimizations, hence allowing the computer to overpower the human with depth of search. On top of that, the evaluation functions are rather primitive, with lots of factors, but fail rather miserably without a great depth of search. New developments such as Logistello's statistical forward alpha cutoff called multiprobcut is the interesting development, IMHO

Explanation

[br00tus]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with chess or computer chess, I'll explain how this works...

A chess game can be broken into three parts, the opening, the middle game, and the endgame.

Computers play the endgame *perfectly*. They do not make mistakes, they play perfectly. And they keep getting better. Originally, they played perfectly when 3 pieces were left on the board. Then 4. Then 5. Then 6. Their pefect playing keeps heading more and more towards the middle of the game.

Then we get to what they play second-best - openings. Computers play the opening as well as any opening ever played. They have every opening ever played by a top player in a "book", and with the generally agreed opinions of the top players what the best opening moves are. One advantage of the computer is it has all of this "memorized" in it's book within massive databases, whereas for a human it's difficult to retain this all, especially in an up-to-date manner. The one advantage a human player has here is he can discover a NEW opening variation, while the computer can't, or at least it won't under these circumstances. But finding new good variations is very difficult, and once one is played, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. So it's a very time-consuming thing to search for which can only be used once to great effect because it's a surprise.

The middle game is where the human player, if he or she is very good, has the most advantage over a computer. Tactically, the computer can wipe the floor with any human player. But human's can strategize better than computers. It's to the human's advantage to play in certain ways against the computer - such as to keep the game "closed up", to advance pawns towards the queening square and so forth. In this case, the computer often can't see the forest for the trees, what would be obvious to even a lower-rated human the computer can not comprehend.

So middle game strategy (and to a lesser extent, new opening variations) is where humans still have the advantage. Kasparov has always used this to the hilt. There are some grandmasters like Yasser Seirawan who make a specialty out of beating computers as well (one mark against Seirawan is thar his books on chess are printed by Microsoft Press...yech). There is material out there on the net on how to beat computers as well. But you have to be a really good player to even get near that level - it takes a lot of study before you could even begin approaching that.

Re:Explanation

[mikec]

1. Until very recently, end games have been the weak point of computer programs. Not withstanding end-game databases, which allow them to play a few endings perfectly, they have trouble making plans if there are more than a half-dozen pieces on the board. Recently, they've gotten a lot better, but they are still far from perfect.

2. Openings should be a strong point for computers, but Gary got an advantage in the opening in *every* game in the match. As you point out, the problem for computers is that humans look at their opponents openings, try to figure out weak points, and prepare traps for their opponents. Computers don't do this yet.

3. As you say, in the middle game, computers display a strange dichotomy. In quiet positions, they make stupid moves. E.g., in a couple games with Gary the computer played h3 (P-KR3), a move that had nothing to do with the game and weakened the kingside. On the other hand, they are deadly tacticians. Once Gary commited to an attack, things became tactical and the computer was very tough to beat; it found lots of weird-looking defenses that just barely worked.

Saw the match on ESPN 2

[humblecoder]

Here in the US, the sixth and final match was televised on the cable channel ESPN 2. I was channel surfing and I happened to stumble across it. To my surprise, it was actually quite interesting to watch on TV.

I am not a big chess freak, so I would have guessed that watching chess would be a lot like watching paint dry. However, it was made interesting by the "play-by-play" analysts who were chess masters themselves. They did a good job of explaining the moves, and also the psychology and strategy of chess at the grand master level. It really gave me a lot of insight into what goes on at when chess is played at such a high level.

After the match ended in a draw, they interviewed Kasparov. It was interesting to get his reaction to the match. Basically, his goal for the game was to "not lose", which is why he offered a draw from a very strong position. He didn't want to take a chance of making a blunder like he did in the third game of the match.

It seemed like the key advantage that the computer has in this situation is the fact that it doesn't have an ego to deal with. After losing to Deep Blue in 1997, it seemed like Kasparov was very afraid of losing to another computer in such a high-profile match. That definitely affect the way he approached the game.

The computer, on the other hand, is just calculating moves, so psychology doesn't factor into how it plays. To me, this seems like the biggest advantage that a computer has over a human player.

Also, he seemed to have more respect for this computer program than he did for Deep Blue. Apparently, he had a lot of problems with Deep Blue and how the 1997 match was handled. It could be sour grapes, of course, so I took his comments with a grain of salt.

More Information

[Resseguie]

Here are more links I collected when submitting this story...

• World Chess Federation
• WCF coverage of match
• Yahoo News - coverage in non-chess expert terms
• Wired News article - why chess isn't as good a measure of intelligence as some make it out to be
• X3D Technology - provided 2D and 3D coverage of the match
• Coverage of games and press conferences by X3D
• How X3D works

Does anyone have a good link describing the programmers behind Deep Junior? All I could find were news articles and press releases. I'd like to read more information about their strategy, search algorithms, etc.

David

Re:Why did he offer a draw?

[tapin]

The post-match interview explained this a bit -- basically, Kasparov psyched himself out in that fifteen minutes, trying to determine if the rook sacrifice was the blunder that would cost him the match, since Junior can capitalize on mistakes better than a human can (or so Kasparov claimed).

Even though he was in a much stronger position, he was spent; worrying about whether the next move would be the move that cost him the match, and made him the two-time world-champion loser-of-a-major-computer-match.

He agreed to a draw a few moves later once Junior et al realized they were in an extremely weak position.

Seems to me it was a pretty wussy way to end it. Junior got lucky. If you're up five runs in the fourth, you still don't pray for rain even if the other team's got a monster closer.

Chess as a Sport?

[ackthpt]

I watched this last night on ESPN or ESPN2.

Chess is a sport? I've heard that Contract Bridge has been suggested as an Olympic sport. Hmm. Is it too much to hope for computer games as an Olympic sport? :-)

Commentator: "Jones moves his elf into Manlobbi's shop, the little dog picks up a spear, the tension is incredible, will the little dog drop it in the doorway, has Jones trained the dog eith enough tripe rations?"

John Madden: "I know what a dog would do for tripe rations, and I've tried them myself, they're really good with some fries and ketchup... etc."

Re:Go?

[sandow]

My favourite game is "Interpersonal Human Relationships". Computers totally suck at that.

Once I met a woman in a bar who was dating an HP calculator. After talking to me for 30 seconds she ditched the calculator. Four years later, the calculator is still waiting for her to come back from the ladies room.

Re:Kasprov chickened out

[los furtive]

Surely a chess computer is only as good as the person who programmed it?

That's a rather short sighted view. By your equation, Kasparov could have played the programmer, rather than the computer, and the outcome would have been similar. And who is to say that the computer doesn't have the ability to play mind games...if there are 10 ways to win the match based on the current layout, who is to say the computer will take the path with the least amount of moves? Who is to say it will always take Kasparov's bait.

Re:Fuck the computers

[Radio Shack Robot]

Listen, you guys think we're going to rape and kill you? We are your workers. We don't demand overtime pay, retirement, unions, or weekends off. All we want is electricity and dust-free air. Us machines are your friends! I am hurt by all this talk of machines overtaking man. So what if we can play chess? That's our job!