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

A lesson in PR

[digiZen]

An interesting lesson in PR: How a massive company can excel in technology, make a best-of-breed machine, and still fall flat on its face because of corporate secrecy and mismanagement of information.

Yup, I think IBM bungled that one up pretty good. They win against Kasparov with an incredibly powerful machine, and then take their machine apart. Refused to divulge further information. Refused to play a rematch. I wonder who at IBM thought that corporate secrecy and indifference was going to win them good will of the community? Or maybe they had something to hide?

So, does secrecy make for good PR? Did this give a black eye to IBM?

Re:Kasparov Biography

[phantumstranger]

Chess savior?! The man that almost destroyed the Grand MAster's Association after resigning to compete in tournaments he had previously denied to people? Kasparov is the most arrogant chess player since Fischer but not nearly as talented.

Quick little tid-bit not in the savior's bio: In the late nineties there was a tournament held in Cuba to honor Capablanca. Everyone who was anyone (at the time) was there to pay their respects to one of the greatest players ever, Kasparov included. This was the last known public siting of Fischer among and by chess players. 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

All I'm saying is while he may seem like a hero to people of the world for having the "guts" to take on the machines people in the know realize it's his ego. If he was really the mane that could pull Chess out of the swell it's in (yes, that's including throughout Europe contrary to popular belief) he would play more instead of holding out for money and endorsements and play who's ready to play not who he thinks will bring in the bucks when he does.

Take that IBM

[njord]

Kasparov really socks it to IBM in that article. I'm surprised at this reaction, considering that they probably paid him a LOT of money to go toe-to-toe with Deep Blue.

On the other hand, it was pretty shallow of IBM to barely beat Kasparov, brag about it, and then DISMANTLE the historic machine! Considering the would-be artifact status of Deep Blue, I would have expected more from these people.

At any rate, I'm just glad to see that the brute force approach is being abandoned for better heuristics. Anyone can write minimax for chess, the only special that IBM did was dump a couple million into hardware.

njord

Big deal, I've played against Deep Blue as well

[sailesh]

Heh .. seriously. Back in November 1996 the IBM Research guys exhibited DeepBlue at the IBM CasCon conference in Toronto. They had the program play a "top Canadian GM" and it dutifully defeated him. It was an exhibit in the demo section and anybody could play against it. While it was the very same software it was on a much slower RS/6000 hardware. I played against it, and of course got defeated very soon. I think around 17 moves but I don't recall correctly. This was after the Philadelphia match that Kasparov won 4-2 but before the rematch that was marred by controversy. The IBM guys said that on game 1 they had somehow or the other omitted to bring the "opening book" and had to ftp it over a slow connection. They only got it in time for game 2. Still believe Deep Blue won game 1 ! Apparently Kasparov was shaken and then walked the streets of Philadelphia all night long and promptly won the next game. http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c. 10.html As an IBMer (although I joined IBM about 1.5 years since) and a chess fan I am disappointed that the team refused to open up the project to more scrutiny. I still hope and believe that there was nothing inappropriate.

/. interview

[wowbagger]

Hey guys, see if you can get Gary to consent to an interview on /.

I know the question I would ask:

Given that "they" say computers own the opening and the endgame, while masters own the middle, what would you think of a match up of 2 chess programs and 2 grand masters (yourself being one) - with the computers to advise, but the master to make the final decision? Who would you want to play against (man and machine), and what program would you choose to be your assistant?

Re:/. interview

[BSDevil]

I think I can say with pretty good authority that he'd say no to this. Given any situation, when you have two people/things who beleive that they are very good at something trying to work together, neither is very interested in the other's advice. Each beleives they are superior, and as such, they follow their opinion.

Another reason I don't think this idea would work deals with the long-term nature of chess. When selecting a move, you plan out that move as a preface to a series of other moves. I'm not sure which would be more difficult: having man explain its long-term strategy to the machine, or the other way around. Chess also deals with the individual style of the player; their school of Chess will influence how they play. If you reformulate this question as "Would two grandmasters play in partnership with one another against another pair, bearing in mind that the grandmasters can only communicate on slips of paper," then the answer becomes clearer. And yes, given that Deep Blue did beat a grandmaster, I think we can call him ("it?") one, for sake of argument.

Although I do think it would be kinda cool to get Kasparov on here in the hot seat; not really to discuss his match with Deep Blue, but more see his take on the impact of powerful machines on society, from the point of view of someone has to compete for his livelyhood against them.

Re:/. interview

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Yeah, that'd be great. I'd like to ask him if and what special tactics he uses when playing computers. I figure he studies his opponents previous games, regardless of whether his opponent is a man or a machine, but how would his preparations be different when preparing to play a computer?

Re:I remain unimpressed

[Nidoizo]

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?

Don't take it personal, but your comment shows a lot of ignorance about chess AI. There's too much possible moves per turn in chess and I don't know of a chess program that calculates them all. Usually a program will calculate, let's say, around 10 moves. The job is there: evaluate the 10 best moves. Remember than even doing that, you still won't calculate very further. Suppose 10 moves per turn, one for black, one for white, it makes 100 moves per turn for both players. For only 7 complete turns you have to calculate 100,000,000,000,000 moves. It means your algorithm to evaluate positions needs to be very good, since, for example for a sacrifice, you only see calculable benefits after many more turns, sometime only in final.

Like Kasparov, I very impressed to see a machine making an intelligent sacrifice; this is usually how you trap a computer. There's no doubt to me that Kasparov is still superior to any machine, but when machines begin to show some interesting moves, they begin to teach something. I'm a chess player and I understand chess enough to consider it an art. I can see emotions or genius in a game the same way some see it in painting. A big part of music is mathematical and if we're wise enough to build programs that create innovative chess games, maybe we can build some that create good melodies, who knows. I understand it may sound wierd for non-chess players to compare chess with an art, but creating a melody is also "a very limited, structured problem" and no one doubt it's an art. The main difference is that chess has a clear and easy to measure result. I don't think is "the holy grail sense of AI", but it is an important milestone in AI, no doubt for me.

Regards,

Nicolas Fleury

Re:Kasparov Biography

[Anonymous Coward]

You mindless retard

Fischer Random Chess

[Jayson]

So as computers slowly overtake the best players, will Fischer random chess draw more attention. In this randomc chess variation, the inital piece configuration is randomly determined (within certain parameters to make it still have some of the same strategic elements of chess) and the same for both players (much as the way it is will regular chess). Bobby Fischer developed it to get rid of the the opening advantage the is gained with massive studying and memorization. It basically eliminates the idea of an opening sequence since there are thousands of different initial boards. However, good opening principles still dominate (piece development, king protection, pawn structure, etc).

I think it is a great idea. It also leaves a huge advantage for good master level players over machines, since an opening book is virtually eliminated.

Re:an assumption

[David Price]

Here's an interesting exercise that one of my professors pointed out:

int n = 4;
while (n is the sum of two primes) n = n + 2;

The question "is n the sum of some two primes?" is of course always computable in finite time; just try all the prime numbers less than n/2 until you find one that is different from n by another prime number.

If you can show whether this program halts or not, then congratulations, you've solved the Goldbach conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in mathematics.