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.)"

Comments

Re:Aritificial Intelligence

[tpengster]

The point being that chess is a, theoretically, *solvable* game.

Actually, that is beside the point. The state space of chess has some 10^120 states, larger than the number of particles in the universe. For practical purposes chess is unsolvable.

The precise solution isn't known, although we have a good deal of empirical data regarding possible solutions. (Although white to win has been proven)

Um.. no, white has not been proven to win. If I'm wrong, Why don't you show us the solution?

The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.

OK, those are two different things. If they relied on empirical data, that means that they would simply be looking up moves in a table. They're not (until the very endgame). They're looking ahead and then measuring positional and material differences. Quite a difference. And for that matter, the human brain, by the strong AI theory, is just a computer. So Kasparov is "just" computing when he plays a move. He just happens to have a massively parallel computer with billions and billions of neurons making computations simultaneously. "Big deal" indeed

Go is the Holy Grail, and they ain't even close. To date no one has made a Go playing program that can reasonably hold it's own against even a relative novice.

Once computers win Go, people will complain that they are "just" doing pattern matching, and so forth. The truth is that critics like you will never be satisfied with the state of AI because once a problem is solved, it will also be demystified. The fact that programs would approach a problem differently from humans is to be expected. These are chess programs. Not brain emulators.

Re:Kasparov Biography

[damiam]

Kasparov saw him enter the room in his (Fischer's) cotton shorts and shirt and wide brimmed straw hat and decided to offer a game and his hand for a shake. Fischer just looked at him, looked at his hand and walked on by to take in a game with his old buddy Spassky

Maybe I'm misreading what you said, but that sounds like Fischer was the arrogant one, and Kasparov was just being polite.