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Chess Championship: Humans vs. Computer

Posted by timothy on from the invaders-in-the-human-castle dept.

An anonymous reader writes "X-bit labs has posted very interesting editorial called "Chess Championship: Humans vs. Computer". During the last 10 years computers penetrated into various spheres of human life. In this article guys try to find out how well computers can play chess and if it would be correct to say that artificial intelligence is superior to human mind. Interesting read."

6 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Interesting, but... by DavidpFitz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I agree with you. After studying AI as an undergrad for 4 years, I came to the conclusion that carrying out well defined tasks is not a subject matter for AI. Chess rules are extremely well defined, and as such all that is being carried out is a search - this is not AI.

    Learning to understand English is altogether different -- Language has a very complex set of very loosely defined rules which change over time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Understanding English is very much an AI task.

    The problem is knowedge, and how it should be represented -- with Chess you just need a big calculator and present as much of the game (projected) as possible. There is no such way to do this with language... a much more complex representation with much more hueristic knowledge is required, and this is where AI starts coming in. Natural language processing is a very tricky field, one which I won't even pretend I understand, and in my opinion nobody quite does... Chomsky probably coming closest, but then again I'd disagree with him on many points!!

    D.

  2. Re:chess != AI by zutroy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In a situation where there aren't predefined rules, how does a human react?

    We judge what the situation most resembles from our experience, and we react accordingly. We act like a case-based learning AI program. We use heuristics to weight our decisions...we just call our heuristics "common sense."

    Computers act more like humans, and humans act more like computers, than many people are comfortable to admit. Computers just don't have the mechanisms to experience as wide a variety of stimuli as us.

    Take a look at the work of Douglas Hofsteader (sp?). His book, "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies," shows relatively simple programs demonstrating surprisingly human-like behaviors.

  3. Re:Interesting, but... by DavidpFitz · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Sure -- rational people understand that a person's has a hierarchical structure where a complex concept depend on a number of simple concepts. Without the lower, more simple concepts, the higher concepts have no meaning since they can't be understood.

    So, knowledge is hierarchial only insofar that simple addition and subtraction pave the way for more complex algebra... knowing algebra without knowing addition and subtraction would give algebra no meaning.

    However, this doesn't account for leaps of thought where entire planes of thinking are bypassed... and nor does it account for mad people (always a tricky one in AI) , especially mad geniuses!

  4. To test a powerful computer, play an ancient game by igomaniac · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The game of Go has proven to be incredibly hard to program, and is a much better indication of where artificial intelligence is today than the game of Chess.

    This article gives an introduction to the problems involved in getting computers to play Go:

    http://www.ishipress.com/times-go.htm

    --

    The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
  5. Re:Ho-hum by po8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nobody got outraged when that new-fangled mechanical auto-mobile contraption started to outpace the world's fastest human runners.

    Allow me to recommend to you the legend of John Henry. About the time period you mention, too. I always mention this story in the Intro AI class I teach.

  6. Bollocks by schnitzi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I was fairly engaged with this article (despite a little too much anthropomorphising of the results of deep computations) until the ridiculous conclusions at the end!

    Yeah, every chess program has a huge openings library to consult with, while a man has none.

    Baloney. A man is allowed to memorize as many openings as he wants, just as the computer has "memorized" them.

    Having found no other way to make the program good at endgame, program developers started feeding them databases of common endgames.

    Again, so? Humans are allowed to memorize as much endgame stuff as they want. Why should computers be disallowed this?

    The above-described matches were played between a man and a multi-processor machine. The processors were prompting to each other and exchanging ideas. This doesn't seem fair.

    Awwww... Why the hell not? Human brains aren't single processor; why should computer opponents have to be?

    Chess programs have a lot of memory at hand. It's like they have a million of chessboards to make moves on. And the human has none.

    The same fallacy, repeated over and over again. The human doesn't have none, he has as many as he cares to remember.

    If I were Kasparov or Kramnik, I would come to the match against the computer with my own board and played all variants on it. The PC can't see, you know.

    And if I were on the computer team, I'd let you. Knock yourself out! Go ahead and fiddle with your chessboard when you could be considering countless more positions in your head.

    All the games the computer won in the above-described matches were won due to blunders of the human opponents. They blundered everything: a piece, a checkmate, a draw, an opening. The cheater can't win without that.

    So, the humans are cheaters then, because they capitalized on computer blunders?

    --



    I object to that article, and to the next reply.