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Kasparov OpEd On His Latest Match

Posted by timothy on from the muse-against-the-machine dept.

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.)"

8 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. The main difference... by Bowie+J.+Poag · · Score: 5, Funny



    Coming up with a chess program to beat Kasparov mercilessly just isn't fun anymore. I say we put more research into writing a chess program that will make him cry while beating him mercilessly

    --
    Bowie J. Poag

  2. The New Challenge by pjdoland · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll be truly impressed when a computer can show the creativity necessary to beat Bobby Fischer at developing crackpot political theories.

    --
    -- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
  3. Take that IBM by njord · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. Shay Bushinsky by jbs666 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Chessbase has an interesting interview with Shay Bushinsky, one of the programmers of Junior.

    --
    I'm not a nerd, nerds are smart!
  5. Re:Aritificial Intelligence by tpengster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Kasparov Biography by damiam · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  7. Really? They had to dismantle Deep Blue... by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...because it kept insisting Fischer had a computer in his shoe while playing!! It wouldn't shut up, and they had to put it down... all very embarrassing for IBM. No wonder they kept it quiet.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  8. Re:I remain unimpressed by Nidoizo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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