Slashdot Mirror
Kasparov OpEd On His Latest Match
molrak writes "Garry Kasparov has written his thoughts and observations on the difference between his recent battle with Deep Junior as opposed to his battle against Deep Blue, including some of the fundamental differences between the two programs. If you missed out on the event, you can catch up with it at the site of the event's sponsor, including both 2d and 3d viewing options. (Note, viewing options require both site registration with x3dworld and proprietary Microsoft software.)"
GameTab - Game Reviews Database
The submitter didn't scour the web properly. You can view the games with professional commentaries with nothing more than a Javascript enabled browser at these links:
Amir Ban annotation
Karsten Müller et al
Chessbase has an interesting interview with Shay Bushinsky, one of the programmers of Junior.
I'm not a nerd, nerds are smart!
You assume that there is such a thing as an "unsolvable" game. This is not, as far as I know, established. This is not, as far as I know, established.
:) But that doesn't take away from the fact that an intelligent human could look at a source printout and figure out if it halted or not, but no general algorithm can be deduced that would do so. Thus, for a computer to win at this game, it would actually have to show intelligence, and not raw computational skill.
Sure it has. I'll give you an unsolvable game right now.
The source code to an entire program is written out by a game master. Two copies of the source are printed out. Two players are then each given an identical copy of the source, and a set of arguments that would be passed to the source were it compiled & executed. The goal is to determine if the program will exit correctly, or if it will halt in the middle. The first player to show either a) where it will halt or b) that it won't halt, wins.
This is a game version of the halting problem. It's been mathematically proven intractable; that is, there's no deterministic (e.g., algorithmic or procedural) method of doing this. You cannot write a computer program that will execute a set series of steps every time and determine what's the case here.
Is this game fun? Probably not.
The Turk was a machine from the 18th century.
A magician had apparently created a machine that could beat anyone at a game of chess. Before the match he would open up the machine and show everyone an array of complicated gears and machinery.
The machine would then beat the person at chess.
People believe that it was actually a very talented midget who would sit inside the machine and watch the game played via magnets. Unfortunatly no one has been able to study the machine because it was destroyed in a fire.
Maybe Deep Blue is the modern day Turk.
Actually this is not new. This is called "Advanced Chess". There was an Advanced Chess tournament held a couple years back and all the Super GMs (> 2700 rating) competed. I believe that Vishy Anand won it. Basically however it left people kinda cold. Let me also be a karma whore: http://www.chessbase.com/events/events.asp?pid=133
> The halting problem is equally unsolvable for both man and machine. We both use algorithms, even if we don't understand our own algorithms.
This has not been proven. Roger Penrose wrote a couple of interesting books about the subject. You are right though that it is also not proven that humans can solve the halting problem in the general case. But your assumption that all mathematical proofs are merely algorithmic (= expressible through formal systems) is certainly debatable, at least.
>Complete, utter, and unmitigated bullshit.
Don't be such an egomaniac.
If you're referring to being beaten by a human opponent, feel free to skip everything else below, as it doesn't apply. However, if you are referring to his match with Deep Blue, his animosity may be justified. For starters, the whole thing was so mysterious from the beginning. But most importantly, Kasparov believed (and still does today) that some human intervention took place during the match.
Remember that chess is a battle simulation game. Just like a real battle, part of the game is studying your opponent and his previous "battles" for weaknesses that you can exploit. To really put a chess computer to the ultimate test, its human opponent must have the opportunity to study how it has performed in the past. I would suspect that the builder's of Deep Blue used studies of Kasparov to refine their machine prior to the competition, whereas Kasparov was not given the same courtesy.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?