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.)"
I guess you never heard of flash.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Kasparov seems to think that making a powerful chess machine would constitute creating a machine with the power to "think." I hardly believe that to be correct, and moreover .. with enough proccessing power, a computer could map out chess moves far further into the future than kasparov could ever hope to.
.. where does one go after they realise that chess is only a little game?
I guess the real question has more to do with
If it were as simple as "the computer is no better at chess than those who programmed it" well then those folk be better than Kasparov. I'm guessing even that whole Deep Jr. team might not be so convincing playing (collectively) as humans against Kasparov.
What do you think of as a practical application, by the way? (Serious question)
Perhaps a better reason is so that once you've given away all your personal information just to register to the site you don't get surprised by the fact that it won't work on your Mac or Linux box. And seriously, Flash has been able to do 3D representations with 3rd party rendering software a long time.
Not that your comment wasn't funny... but I don't think he's been beaten mercilessly yet.
As I understand it, Deep Blue was a narrow victory and Deep Junior was a tie. Or did I miss something? I think the machines are gonna have to be winning 6-0 rather than tieing 3-3 before we'll see a tear from Mr. Kasparov. heh.
The three stages of a chess game are "opening", "middle game", and "end game". In summary, computers will always be far superior in the opening and end-game, because they can play those parts of the game perfectly. The middle game is where humans will always have the advantage.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
I don't "get" the fascination people have with computers playing chess. Searching a game tree is not something I find overly impressive. The root problem (the tree searching algorithms and such) is somewhat interesting, but the computer isn't playing chess in the same way as a person. I don't really care how far down into a tree a modern processor has time to search. It doesn't indicate any sort of "intelligence" in the holy grail sense of AI. Chess is a very limited, structured problem.
My calculator can find nth roots faster and with greater precision than I can...should I be fascinated by that as well?
Not only was the lastest match a tie, Kasparov actually made a stupid (for him) mistake in one of the earlier games which he might've won. The human element, it'll getcha every time. If Kasparov could always play at his best like Deep Junior can, then he could quite likely have beaten it this time around, too. Still, Deep Junior was an impressive, sexy bitch, as Kasparov says in this article. If _Kasparov_ is impressed, you should be, too!
You are assuming that an intelligent human is capable of determining whether a given program will halt on a given input. Even assuming a human who lived for ever and never got bored, it's still far from given that human intelligence is sufficiently more powerful than a turing machine to solve the halting problem in general.
The halting problem doesn't mean that no algorithm can give correct halting answers for certain inputs.
(Assuming such a game existed, how would you judge the results?)
Because we have a sense of humor?
Thanks.
The reason that computer chess fascinates so many people is exactly because brute force doesn't work. The possibilities are so enormous that you can't even begin to look at them all.
In the most recent Man vs. Machine match, the computer was actually slower than Deep Blue. Yet it played amazingly good chess. Unfortunately Deep Blue isn't still around, so we can only speculate that Deep Junior is the superior program.
Humans are slower still; MUCH slower. And yet we can, in many cases, play better chess than computers. The difference is that chess masters know instinctively which moves to consider while machines are stuck looking at a huge number of moves. The holy grail of chess AI would be to finally come up with program that can cut down the number of moves to consider just like the human brain can. Such a breakthrough would be a landmark achievement in AI and would have tons of practical applications outside of playing chess.
I can agree with you on one point, though... chess "technology" probably puts too much effort into the game tree searching aspect of the problem.
Most of the effort is being put towards better position evaluation algorithms, etc... In this way, chess programs are being improved by basically tweaking algorithms we already have and hard-coding in the programmer's own knowledge about the strategic value of certain positions. Things like "doubled pawns are bad" and "in a locked pawn structure a knight is worth more than a bishop".
If we're going to make real progress we definitely need to move away from those approaches and start trying to get at the previously mentioned "holy grail" of chess. Brute-forcing human players to death shouldn't be the goal. We should instead focus on how the human mind approaches such an impossibly huge problem, and still manages to kick the computer's ass.
If a computer could be taught to fish, there'd be people saying that because the computer couldn't catcha fish 100% of the time, or because he was programmed to do it that way it's not intelligent. But... if we could find the perfect chess algorithm and the perfect 'catch a fish' algorithm and put them in a computer... could we say it had some real intelligence? heh, nice
Is this game fun? Probably not. :) 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.
I was with you right up to the end. However it is most certainly not shown that a human can solve the halting problem. It is proven that (in the general case) no algorithm can say whether a program halts. The only way a human can prove whether an algorithm halts is by using mathematical formalisms that are also limited.
What people can often do is make an "intelligent" guess about whether a program halts. In fact computers can do this too: you can provide a machine with a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) that it can use to estimate the likelihood that a program will halt. That program could do better than random, just as a human could. But that is not the same as proving the program does or does not halt.
I have never seen any evidence to suggest that humans can solve the halting problem for the class of unsolvable programs.
Nevertheless you are right that there are unsolvable games. In fact there are an infinite number of them.
Sailing over the event horizon
I'm not convinced that a human is capable of solving the halting problem in the general case. In a case where the human can trace all possible execution paths, or deduce other things about the program's behavior, it's solvable, but a computer can solve the problem in these cases as well. In short, give me any particular program that a human can solve the halting problem for, and I'd bet you can codify the logic used so that a computer can do so just as well (and given enough samples, code a general computer program with the same power as the human in this domain).
Basically, to prove your point, you'd need to show that humans have some processing power strictly greater than that of a Turing machine, which is a somewhat controversial thesis.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe I'm misreading what you said, but that sounds like Fischer was the arrogant one, and Kasparov was just being polite.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Which single OS are you talking about? According to InternetWeek.com Windows XP is on little over 20% of all computers with an internet connection. Windows 98 is around 35%. Or could you be talking about Cisco's Catalyst OS, because man there's a heck of a lot of Cisco switches out there that are "on the internet".
So what, he's arrogant? He's also done a lot for the chess world. And, quite frankly, he's the best chess player since B. Fischer (yes, still better than that upstart Kramnick).
The simple fact is, that when people talk about the best chess players ever, there are two candidates for #1: Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov. Since they've never played each-other, we don't know who's better than who, and it's a topic of unsubstantiated speculation.
Regarding Bobby Fischer, I'm tired of hearing about his anti-semitism. Bobby Fischer is himself half-Jewish, and is friends with several Jewish people, despite his anti-semitic beliefs. Irrelevant of the man's political beliefs -- which he's entitled to, like the rest of us, think whatever the fuck he wants -- he's still one of the greatest chess players of all time.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
There are some pretty good machine learning techniques that can do things like that. Some start with more hints than others, and some work better than others. It's definitely a very open area of research.
I'd also note that if computers can do this, however, it's imposing stronger requirements on them than on humans -- most humans learn a great deal of things from others rather than deducing them on their own from basic rules or first principles, which is in some ways akin to programming a computer with strategies.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Complete, utter, and unmitigated bullshit.
If it can't be solved algorithmically, humans can't solve it either. Even if a human came up with the right solution, in the general case, you would never be able to prove it!
Simple example: I write a program which "solves" chess. In other words, it loops through every possible game configuration and determines whether, say, white can always force a win. If so, it halts. Otherwise, it just drops into an infinite loop. Now, naturally, this game would take longer than the universe's lifespan to run, but that's not the point. The point is that determining whether or not this program halts is equivalent to solving the problem in the first place! To know whether or not it halts, you have to know whether or not white can always force a win. The halting problem is equally unsolvable for both man and machine. We both use algorithms, even if we don't understand our own algorithms. The fact that we do use algorithms means that we're just as subject to the rules of what is and is not computable.
Put in other terms, a computer simulating a human brain would be able to solve the exact same problems as a human, and in the same ways. If a human can solve a problem (and prove it, not just make an intelligent guess), then it's by definition computable. The only counter to that is to assume that it is impossible to build a computer that simulates a human brain, but you're on shaky ground making such a claim.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
IBM deserves no end of crap about their behavior. "I'm only going to play one match, and if I win, I will retire undefeated!Ha ha!!"
Free Hans!
Isn't that like saying that because you taught a guy how to fish, he's not intelligent just becuase he was taught? Just as the guy senses bites on the line, the computer sees offensive moves and counters.
If all the guy could do was fish just like you taught him then yes he's not all that inteligent. The key difference is that from you teaching him how to fish, the guy might extrapolate a totally different way of fishing. A computer won't ever do that unless you explicitly program that extrapolation algorithm.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that the computer won't make any discoveries unles you taught it HOW to make this discovery. Once you figured out a process, you can take advantage of the computer's computational abilities to calculate a result (chess moves, etc) better than a human can. How about the computer inventing something totally new, unprompted?
THAT is inteligence, and that is (bad or good, your call) impossible given current tech.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Terrorism is attacking civilian targets for the fear factor. The Pentagon is the fucking head of the military - hardly a civlian target by any stretch of the imagination. Does pointing this out mean I agree with the 9/11 attackers? Of course not. TO assume so one would have to be, what were the words you used - oh yes, "a blithering idiot".
This is just like the flak Bill Maher got over pointing out that "cowardly" is the wrong word to use to describe a group that willingly died to carry out an attack of some sort - EVEN IF that attack is a terrorist one. The hijackers were guilty of a great many evils, but cowardice wasn't one of them. Just the opposite, actually.
People think that any sort of criticism of the press coverage of an event equates to support of the perpetrators of that teven, because people are idiots.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Yes, but if DJ did do this, then in the same position, with the same time constraints etc. DJ will miss the move every time you repeat it; i.e. there is no way that DJ will play any better in the same position so, by definition, it always plays at its best.
I would think that adding some randomness to the algorithm would have two benefits. The first is my intuitive sense that a degree of randomness is more efficient. (Is a random walk more efficient than a deterministic walk in the general case? I apologize for my ignorance of a fundamental question of which I should be well familiar.)
The second is in the context of the game being a contest. Will a human opponent play the same game every time? I suspect not. Not merely because their own decisions are apparently non-deterministic, but because they may intentionally chose to play a game differently to avoid the competitive disadvantage of being totally predictable. It would be in the interests of a chess algorithm to do the same thing.