Slashdot Mirror
Man Vs Machine In Chess - Who Is Winning?
FFriedel writes "In a few weeks, the world's strongest player Garry Kasparov will take
on X3D Fritz in a high-profile man-machine
chess match. Who is the statistical favourite? Since computers have been steadily
improving and are now holding their own against the very strongest human players,
one would think it may be Fritz. Not necessarily, says statistician Jeff Sonas,
who doesn't believe computers will inevitably surpass the top humans, and presents empirical evidence to support his claim as part of a series of articles for ChessBase."
If you think you know something about computer chess but haven't read Behind Deep Blue by the man largely responsible for creating it, you need to correct your error asap. Did you know, for instance, that in 1997 Deep Blue had 480 chips running its chess program _in silicon_ with 30 rs/6000 nodes controlling them? Moore's law isn't going to let a 2 (4?) cpu PC catch up THAT fast, let alone when it's pure software.
BTW, the Fritz people make a big deal about beating deep blue in 1995. That would have been a big deal, but the program they beat was Deep Thought II ("Deep Blue Prototype"), not deep blue, a weaker program running on weaker hardware. The match was in Hong Kong where DT2 had persistent problems with their data line to the USA where DT2 was physically located.
Anyone else think that once machines take over the Earth, all they will do is play chess against eachother?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I feel sorry for the computer that kicks his ass at chess, with his temper he's likely to smash it to pieces with a hammer... Didn't he get pissed off and gave up against deep blue2?
Have you ever heard of Deep Blue (or it's brethren) defeating a female chess player? Of course not.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think it'd be more intresting to see the top two chess computers play a speed match against each other.
This is very interesting. I've often wondered how Computers could ever top man, since they run on programs made by man, are they not? It just seems like humans couldn't make chess software that was better than a human itself. Anyone care to shed some more light on this subject?
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
Moxy Fruvous did an amusing take on the topic a few years ago at MIT on their U.S. tour. The discussion made it on their "Live Noise" album as "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue", and a transcript is available at http://www.fruvous.com/ln-lyr.html about 2/3 of the way down the page. (Warning, there are a few instances of adult language in the discussion)
Please note the subtle difference between the theses: i) machines will not overtake mankind; ii) machines will not inevitably overtake mankind. Sonas asserts (ii), not (i).
As long as its not another round of computer aided chess vs man... as I recall the last few times a 'computer' beat this guy, they had a team of programmers modifying the engine as the game was in progress.
Its not cheating; its computer *aided* chess.
Ahem.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I consider it's still humans competing with other humans playing chess. On one hand we have a chess-master using all the power of his brain, on the other some computer people using a high-powered computer.
When a computer can learn to play chess by itself and then beat the top players, then we have something to look at.
chess is a finite problem, and although it's a very large finite problem, it's one that some day can be solved. I don't know why people care all that much about computers being able to beat humans, maybe they will just have to start playing each other. I'm only going to be worried when computers start writing more interesting stories than the top writers
Are humans really competing with machines, or with other humans (albeit not directly)? Is the computer simply bridging the gap between minds of different tastes?
Didn't humans program everything the computer has as far as logic is concerned? Isn't the computer just running through the programmer's/designer's logic?
Part of the problem is that Kasparov is this generation's GM. Kasparov plays very emotional games. He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win.
This is a great strategy against people, but it's not so effective against computers. Kasparov is probably the worst chess master to pit against a machine since Ruy Lopez (I think he's won with the Ruy Lopez opening a few times, case in point: it's a brutal and humiliating play for the losing opponent).
Kasparov knows that the computer can "think through" future moves better than he can. Computers, in fact, do the opposite of human chess players: we set goals and try to find ways to get there while computers search through various ways to find a satisfactory goal they can achieve. So, Kasparov plays it very conservative and keeps himself out of any situations that give the computer too much range of foresight, which is why the Kasparov/computer matches tend to look like Verdun (though he's been surprised a few times).
Personally I'd like to see some of the younger generation take on the big programs. They tend to play more technically and less passionately than Kasparov and his generation.
All's true that is mistrusted
Like when a player scores a touchdown? Or do the programmers wheel it around in circle chanting it's name? You gotta let them have a little fun. Better then making them mad and having them go Terminator on us.
MMORPG Fan? Prove your worth!
Once the aliens spend perhaps an hour covering the rules of chess, they'll slap us and our machines silly.
Not to get too off-topic, but there are also now several (increasing) prizes for beating top ranked players (well, rather, any professional player and occasionally there's a prize for beating a dan ranked amateur) in Go.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, there is an excellent, if somewhat dated, article that discusses some of the difficulties for getting a computer to play Go well. It also talks about Janice Kim, a 1 dan (professional) at the time (now a 3 dan), beating the then-best program when the computer had a 25 stone handicap. To give an idea, a 9 stone handicap in an experimental games between evenly matched professionals generates about 140 point advantage.
As I said, it is a bit dated (5 years old) and computers have improved, but we are still nowhere close to beating a professional.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I was wondering a while ago if chess could be set out into a possibility tree with work such as seti@home where one players actions will always be counterable. Theoretically it's possible, but i haven't done the preliminary calcs to determine processing power necessary/time/etc. Your thoughts?
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
A hundred, perhaps.
Anybody know?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Why don't they create a distributed client that could be ran by thousands of people at the same time to compute results? Like Distributed.net... I certainly would run such a client on my PC for the time of the tournament... I know the Fritz machine is REALLY fast, but heck, it can't be faster than 25 000 computers all running at the same time to compute the moves...
I think the real interesting test would be to require the computer to run at a clock speed comparable to a human. Then this would be a true test of AI. Deep blue's wires are so much quicker than a brain's connections that it is getting maybe a year's worth of thinking time compared to the human. it would be interesting if a computer could play chess without the huge advantage of speed.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
Are chess computers improving faster than grandmasters?
Sooner or later both the computers and the top players will be able to work out every move from both ends of the game (i.e. the start and the end)
When this happens they'll realize it's all pointless and start nuclear war instead.
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
I notice that the question is "Man vs. Machine". You completely ignore the hundreds of grandmaster chess players that happen to be female.
Name a few.
Any in the top ten?
Didn't think so.
More importantly, the article mentions a match against Kasparov, most certainly a male. Thus, although we can philosophically ponder the bigger question of "human vs machine", the title has no sexism involved, without even resorting to a discussion on the use of the masculine neutral in English.
I think human play will improve as machines improve until humans can't keep up with the machine anymore. It's hard to say when that happens because chess is an exponential problem. 10-20 years, I think.
I think humans may always surpass due to those things you can't imitate, like creativity, or emotion. It's those little things that make us humans, that make us so much better at things. It's those things that don't make us basic animals.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Computers are only good at chess for two reasons:
1) They can brute force the game. On the 8x8 board there is a very limited number of permissible moves at any given moment, and an even lower number of desirable ones.
2) They can easily tell if a move benefits them. Chess is a game where its very easy to look at the board and say who's winning. Board position, captured pieces, influence are all key points that anyone can spot at a glance.
In my eyes, this just isn't a challenge, but straightforward application of raw computing. If the programmers want to impress me, they'll create a program that can play Go. As of this post, there still isn't a program in existance that can consistantly defeat a shodan (beginning level pro). Why? The 19x19 board and the ability to play just about ANYWHERE on it makes the game much more difficult to brute force. Also, strategy is much more complicated and board positions take a very experienced player to accurately analyze (at least in games involving professional-level players).
No, Chess may become the dominion of the machines, but I won't consider it a statement of supremacy until they can beat us here. That should be the programmers' next challenge.
It is simply naive to say computers will never be able to outdo human thought, such as that required for chess or other logic/pattern-recognition based tasks. This is analogous to 19th century Royal Society scientists claiming one could never escape the Earth's gravity into space and beyond (and providing "proof," mind you). But I digress. Chess is not so much about logic and thought (in the normal sense) as it is for pattern recognition and "looking ahead." The best chess players in the world have nearly memorized all the possible combinations in all the possible scenarios, contrary to popular belief that their abilities are innate. I don't know if software has evolved enough to beat him this time around, but if the second math was any indication, my money's on the machine.
A blog like any other.
ok.. I realize that chess is a very complex game. I realize that for decades they've been been trying to create a chess computer that can consistantly beat the best human players. but my 1 question is.. even with the googleplex, or how ever many possible game combinations there are, why is it impossibile with todays computing and storage power, to create a computer that has every possibile game, in it's memory/storage. and barring all else, choose the appropriate path to checkmate, based on the other players moves? (Isn't that somewhat what the chessmasters do, themselves, based on experience, and insight, choose the best patterns of moves to win?) I realize that isn't really 'computing' and it's just following a set path, based on input variables, but comeon.. you're telling me, we can trace a molecule's path back to the big bang, and we can't figure out every possibile chess game? will someone who knows more about chess than me, answer, and set my mind at ease?
LostboyTNT MercyHosting.Com
Server-Status.Com
50Bux.Com
TLDR.Com
It should be humankind, or humanity.
on slash dot. I assume you're a Mac user.
Man vs. Machine: Who will win?
Simple. The one who can disable his opponent by pulling the plug.
One thing that will keep people on top for a while is our inconsistancies. A computer works on logic, and can usually be predicted to do something. People, on the other hand, are spontanious, and use a different kind of logic. We also take risks that do not make sense. But if something is crazy enough, it could trick a computers. Because computers do not lie. They cannot lay traps and they cannot bluff.
Marvin knew: "Think of a number, any number..."
What happens when an AI figures out the optimal strategy is to simply kill its opponent, thus guaranteeing a "win"? Let's be careful how you specify those goal conditions, guys!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Completely right. I read an interesting book on that some time back where the anthropologist author explains why no civilization in history has ever been "matriarchal" as it is commonly conceived. He debunks several of supposed exceptions, and then goes on to describe why the male drive causes a disproportionate number of males to attain the highest socially regarded positions in any society. For the same reason that a disproportionate number of males attain the least favored positions - criminals and so on.
But besides all that, I think that chess may be more like professional football than cooking. Some women are very good at it, but the top few hundred players are all male. Some of the difference is probably not due to competitive drive.
from the article:
"The red line is Garry Kasparov's rating over time, and the blue line is the rating of the top computers on the SSDF list. The blue line is creeping closer and closer to the red line. It seems just on the verge of crossing over. "
But then, further, down, he writes:
"Although computers obviously must be improving in recent years, the strongest humans seem to also be improving at about the same rate."
These two statements contradict each other, don't they? Either computers are improving faster than grand-masters, meaning the graph and its extraploations are true; or, computers and grand-masters are improving at the same rate, which would mean the percentage of human wins and draws would be generally the same as in previous years (something not indicated by the second graphic in the article)?
the coolest club on
Posting anonymously since it's offtopic..
:)
I feel like I'm biting a troll here, but let's address what you say. Many great inventions of the past were by women who then let a man release their invention because a woman simply wouldn't be taken seriously and it wouldn't be socially acceptable for them to do so.
It's more out of tradition than any true reason that men are dominant. It is not sexist to say "man" instead of "human" in writing, in my opinion. It's a little silly to make a fuss about it.
Biologically speaking, men are physically stronger than women. But as for their mental ability, there's no conclusive evidence that one gender is better than the other. If you still believe that women are superior, feel free to go live in a fundamentalist country like Afghanistan that treats their women like shit. Or build a time machine and go back to the middle ages.
You know, this is a reasonably 'on-topic' post to make a Beowulf cluster joke. Especially considering the time's taken to compute each move. By moving to a distrobuted network (each node calculating a certain set of moves, and rating them on appropriateness) It could help with the time's (the last match, it took about a day for the computer to analyse through all combinations, and select the best one)
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
Yes, computers are quickly improving their chess ratings, and this will probably continue
Yes, overall, humans aren't improving chess playing skill as quickly, HOWEVER
... this won't mean computers will be able to consistently beat humans, because humans are basically understanding the ways that computers are playing better, and can counteract.
For example, the only time a computer ever beat the world champion was 1997 Deep Blue vs Kasparov. Every other time has been either human win or a draw, and htere have several more attempts since then.
Maybe computers are playing faster, or thinking more moves ahead. But maybe there is not really any "substance" in their style of play?
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
I think the longest I have ever lasted was maybe 4 or 5 moves, and it beat me. Go figure...
According to p. 45 of Russel & Norvig's AI book, a look up table for the game of chess (i.e. if you mapped every achievable permutation of chess pieces on a board) you would have 10^150 entries. Unfortunately, there are only 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. Even with excellent heuristics, I think these numbers show that a computer that capable of playing perfect chess will not be built in the foreseeable future.
I ran the numbers past my statistic calculating supercomputer (DeepStat) which calculated that Kasparov has no chance against X3D Fritz. Furthermore, DeepStat calculated that Jeff Sonas couldn't tell the difference between a Gaussian and Chi-Squared distribution if his TI-95 depended on it, so nanner-nanner-nanner...
This guy has a very interesting write up about chess and probability. Worth a read.
the mathes that are being played by humans against computers these days (expcept for kasparov vs DeepBlue) are all mostly on single processor PCs. But, single processor PCs are not the only computers in this world. It is only on these machines that humans are able to draw against computers, not win. The standard method being used by GMs to draw is to set up a closed position which need deep strategical moves and long term plans to win againt. Since the games are limited to 40 moves in 2 hrs per player, the single processor computers agree for draws in such positions when they are unable to calculate the winning moves in time. Given that processor speed is increasing rapidly, even these single processor PCs will beat humans pretty soon. If a human played against amy of the Top500 supercomputers today, he would get his butt kicked big time, even Kasparov. I think a cluster of less than 10 computers is enough to beat kasparov. Since kasparov already lost to deep blue, nobody is intersted in investing money in writing software for parallel processing chess programs. Its considered a done deal. The statistics the author of the article is using to prove his point are only valid for PCs.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
"The only way to win, is not to play."
How about a nice game of gobal thermonuclear war?
After the computer beats me at chess i usually taunt it with my "self-awareness." Gosh... do I really do that? I'm pathetic. Well, at least I know I am, stupid computer...
I can't even beat an Apple II at chess. DAMN YOU CHESSMASTER 2000!!
There are approximately 35^100 legal options for a chess game (that's a 2 with about one hundred and fifty four trailing 0's).
Assuming you can process... 2 million moves per second, just like Deep Blue, the universe would end by the time you finished (i.e. 4.1477e+137 millenia away!)
(Admitting I didnt read the Chess Base pages)
Look at the game TicTacToe. There are some finite amount of moves (something like 9!). Therefore it takes very little space to store the entire game tree, consisting of every possible move, in a computer. This means that a computer will always win a game, because it knows the best path at any given move. (TicTacToe might be wierd in the fact it seems that two good players can always tie)
Then look at Checkers. Sure, its much more complex then TTT. However, we have already completely mapped Checkers as well. Again, this means that the computer will Always beat a human.
Chess is much more complex then both Checkers and TTT. But the fact remains that it is still a finite set of moves. When a computer reaches the ability to store all those moves (and it will), then the computer will again win any game at all of chess, whether it is against a Grand Master or not.
The same concept can be applied to any game at all with a finite number of moves. As soon as the computer can hold an entire game tree in memory, then it will always win. (yes, given time, even Go will be completely mapped)
This
Many great inventions of the past were by women who then let a man release their invention because a woman simply wouldn't be taken seriously and it wouldn't be socially acceptable for them to do so.
So if these inventive women hid behind the male pawns who released their inventions, how do you know that the women were the inventors??
I'm not saying women can't or don't invent; I believe they can and do.
But where's your evidence? Did you go back in time and see the women inventing these great things? Did you perhaps channel their spirits? Or maybe they were reincarnated as you? Was the secret knowledge passed along like the half-remembered rituals of the crypto-Jewish marranos?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
There is a hell of a lot of evidence on mental ability. History for one thing. But also on modern IQ scores. Men and women have the same average as a population. But men are far better represented at the top and bottom tails of the bell curve than women. Women's IQ scores seem to be more bunched up. And IQ quite clearly measures intellectual ability. IQ differences among siblings are well correlated to social standing later in life.
Humanity? I don't think so, sister!
It should be personkind, or personity.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to write a very long letter to the people who make Manwich.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
personkind?
Oh no you din't!
... being met here?
a) Top human vs Top computer: computers defending champs;
b) Elegance of tactics: humans (computers still brute force);
c) Efficiency (wins/joules): humans for forseeable future; and
d) Number of Wins: Average Human vs Average Computer: computers rule (sorry but people who beat computers of any level are seriously in the minority).
Pessimistically, humans take the occasional battle but the war has been lost.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It would kick my ass. But that's not saying much.
-Tim Louden
...but if you think Chess is complex, you guys should try playing Go (wei`chi, igo, baduk... many names).
l ems.com
Basically, there's a million dollar prize out of someone can make a go playing computer program that can beat a weak professional. How are they doing? Well... if you've played Go for a couple months you can probably beat the strongest program to date. (And yes, I can)
What's go like? Try:
http://www.usgo.org (many links there)
http://www.kiseido.com
http://www.goprob
If computers start consistently defeating humans in chess, does it mean humans will loose interest and stop playing it? I guess, not many chess grandmasters would want the "big brother in the box" watching over them, analysing their mistakes during the matches to the cheers of the crowd, thus making them some form of puppets in a theater. Would people start playing complicated games (from the computers point of view) as Go & others?
Meanwhile, the fastest airplane ever built is still the SR-71A made in the 1960's. That doesn't mean aircraft technology has come to a standstill. It just means outrunning the SR-71A hasn't been a priority of aircraft builders since then. If they wanted to expend the resources to make a faster plane today, they could do it.
Deep Blue II was the SR-71A of chess computers. What's come afterwards has been a lot more economical and practical, but hasn't tried to match it in pure performance, and hasn't done so.
Of course humans will eventually be beat by computers. They have Moore's Law and we don't. End of story.
simon
home page
how cool
Tron anyone? ;) Or maybe war games :-P
The reason for this is that women have two X chromosomes. So they have redundant copies of all their genes - which reduces the frequency of DNA wonkiness. Y-chromosomes are shorter than X-chromosomes, so in all males, there's a whole section of DNA that won't "match up" with the other side. That's why there's a higher incidence of retardation in males.
I for one welcome our chess playing computer overlords.... wait a minute, are chess playing supercomputers any more imposing than chess playing geeks?
Chess computers are being developed steadily and yeah, they can kick any GM's ass...that's just because they are machines. Gary Kasparov, after playing with Deep Blue remarked, "It's a machine!!! It doesn't feel pressure". So true...the media goes ga-ga about a champion playing with a machine but almost nobody bothers about the pressure factor...
Happy Hacking!!!
In fact, it is this fundamental difference in how humans and (conventional) computers work that makes the man-vs-machine issue interesting. (E.g., a slow, massively parallel network built for collecting grubs and and having sex, against a fast, serial turing machine built for number crunching)
Look, you can slap together all the specialized hardware you want, and yes, a room full of top of the line silicon will probably be able to beat a human at any specialized task, especailly one with discrete soloutions.
Ill be impressed when they have a computer that can beat me at chess, write a sonnet, cook up lunch, play fetch with a dog, ponder a sunset, drive a car, change a diaper, laugh at groucho marx, and wonder if it has a soul. Anything less is nothing but an overgrown calculatior. A nifty goddamned calcualtor, dont get me wrong, but a calculator.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
That's why there's a higher incidence of retardation in males.
Bordering on 100% upon last observation.
While the total number of states in Tic Tac Toe is a boringly small finite number, the total number of states in chess is rather amusingly large. And by "amusingly large", I should point out that I'm a large number theorist.
How large is "amusingly large"? Around 10^150, if I remember my AI class correctly. Discarding entirely the problem of how you'd create a game tree of that size (given the cosmos has about 10^77 particles), let's just address the energy required to compute the table.
It requires an absolute minimum of kT*ln2, or about 3*10^-26 Joules, of energy to set a bit. Each cell on a chess board requires a minimum of four bits to store its state (it has to store a three-bit enum { PAWN, ROOK, KNIGHT, BISHOP, QUEEN, KING } and a one-bit enum { BLACK, WHITE }). So for a 64-block chess grid, you're looking at 256 bits just to store state.
256 * 3*10^-26 = 7.7*10^-24
7.7 * 10^-24 * 10^150 = 7.7 * 10^126
Do you have any freaking clue how much energy 10^126 Joules is? It's frickin' huge. Like enough to cause a symmetry-breaking event which would propagate through the universe at the speed of light and utterly annihilate everything in its path, including the computer churning out the complete decision tree for chess.
I can see it now. When Judgment Day comes, it's all going to be because of a Slashdotter who thinks he knows a lot more about what computers can and can't do than he really does, and goes off to solve unsolvable problems without considering the thermodynamic consequences of his actions.
Typical for Slashdot.
I'm a werewolf you insensitive clod!
Laws are for people with no friends.
well sure we can.. 1 at a time :D
:)
but think of it this way..
even we could figure it out.. where could we store that information? we'd need a computer the size of the universe, with each particle being able to store the information for 1 particle in it.
(or is that the way it really is.. and we just live in... the matrix
LostboyTNT MercyHosting.Com
Server-Status.Com
50Bux.Com
TLDR.Com
I've been playing Japanese Shogi on my PC for a while. It is like a more volatile Chess where there is only a king and 8 pawns. Pawns can move any distance N,S,W,E. The King can more any distance N,S,W,E,NW,NE,SW,SE. The only thing that impedes the distance is a blocking piece.
I've learned the purpose of the game is to take advantage of your opponent's weaknesses while not exposing any yourself unless you are trying to trap your opponent which you must also pay attention to not let happen to yourself.
If a computer can be taught these simple rules and have it review all past strategies ever used then it will be on par with any opponent (human or PC). It is a game of beating the borg. You have to come up with newer ever-more clever strategies in the hopes of fooling the computer into thinking that you are employing a different strategy.
Or just tell it that "everything I say is a lie" and watch smoke bellow from the mainframe. You also might want to plan an escape route in advance. IBM suits would be after you in no time!
perChIlDKind?
Couldn't wait to stick your big CIDK into that word, couldn't you!
Sexist pig!
Pandora's Box by Jim Farris
http://xaa.tripod.com/PBMain.htm
Chess players tend to think that they will always have an edge on machines, because they like to think that chess is more than just some mathematical system. Often times, they associate chess skill with intelligent thought. If a computer can beat them, then there's nothing magical about the game that makes it a judge of "intelligence." Furthermore, you can hardly say that computers will never beat humans at chess because they havn't been 100% sucessful in doing so thus far. A couple of generations of architecture ago, a computer would not have posed to challenge to a grandmaster. Now, computers and humans look about even. Unfortunatly for the people rooting for humanity, computers "evolve" faster than we do, and in a couple of years, this debate will probably be over.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Really! Playing chess is just like anything else. There are experts everywhere, but MOST are not famous.
I think a much more fair competition would be to allow play against this super chess playing computer available registered users via the Internet.
Registration should require some sort of mini-test to evaluate the basic chess skills of the user (this would prevent non-chess players from wasting precious CPU time.
Basically, my point is, there are probably high school kids in the chess club that could beat any computer chess game that would otherwise never get the chance. Let's see it!
The whole point is the evolution of computers. When you take into account how fast computers (processing, software, etc.) are progressing in specialized tasks, it doesn't take an Einstein to see the implications a century or so from today, where they may very well combine all their specialized tasks and kick our inefficient asses. Think about the bigger picture.
A blog like any other.
Man wins.
The man who makes the tool that beats the guy without the tool wins.
Guy with gun beats guy with sword, guy with sword beats man with fist. Man with fist beats armless dude.
Simple enough for you?
This isn't a question of man vs. machine. This is man vs. man.
The "machines" are created by man as a collection of chess knowledge and principle. Essentially they're chess by committee, a very fast, giant, and efficient committee, but a committee nonetheless. Flaws in their understanding of the game will be reflected, and the imperfect compromises intrinsic to such aggregate systems will manifest themselves. (see: every funny Dilbert)
BTW, the dude actually playing vs. the software engineers and hardware developers ('cause that's who he's really playing against, they, and the chess "experts" who help them) might have a recital to attend, simultaneously he might have an itch, a touch of alcoholic dementia, gas, a football match, shingles, or a really profound comment that should appear here...
Likely not.
Show me a computer with shingles and a penchant for "Old Hickory" and I might accept this whole man vs. machine business...
'til then,
-dameron
I'll only be impressed if they add in a real trash-talk routine. I want to computer to tell one of these guys something like "your game is weak", or "nice move- does your husband play chess too?"
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In the Matrix, everyone was actually plugged into the giant energy-creating machine and had their consciousness fed through the machine. If the computer wanted to, at any time it could have pulled the plug on anyone.
If we all existed in a Matrix-like world where what we see is not really reality, then I would be afraid that at any moment some 'other' could pull my plug.
Philosophers have long debated the concept of being and have come to no conclusion as to whether this reality is actual reality or simply a complex computer program designed to make us think we exist. It's scary to think that this reality may not actually be our real reality, you know?
I'll be sure to take the blue pill if anyone ever asks me to make the kind of choice that Neo made.
...not to mention that it's a calculator that will probably get laid more than its opponents.
I had this discussion with a friend of mine once, is chess just a larger more complex type of tic-tac-toe?
I mean, it is possible to end in a stalemate after all. Is it at least concievable that the only way to assure not losing is to simply create a cats game?
would this explain the large amounts of draws we are seeing here? Is it an eventuality that someday computer vs computer and computer vs man games will all end in stalemates?
Something the article doesn't touch on is that although chess grandmasters were caught off guard by the strength of chess computer's in the mid-90's, since then we have learned a tremendous amount about the computer's weak spots. The computer for example is very poor at playing in tight positions like some lines in the Caro-Kann and French defenses. Also many of the so-called hypermodern openings.
I imagine the new breed of young GM's like Ponmariov, Grischuk and Malakhov probably find the prospect of beating stock Fritz/Junior/Hiarcs rather boring. A few extra CPU's isn't going to make a big difference in terms of playing power. Much more effective is to spend time tuning the engine's opening book and that takes traditional GM's with novelties.
Kasparov should win this easily, though he did miss a trivial 2 move combination in a tournament recently so you never know...
Yeah, yeah.
You're just mad cause Mia Hamm can kick yer ass.
So long as there's a power outlet to pull
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
Begin with the end, the endgame. The end of the endgame rather. This (the end of the endgame) the computer does play perfectly. It's skill keeps improving as the tables come out - three pieces left on the board, four pieces left on the board, five pieces, six pieces...and I see this continuing. So the computer is increasingly perfect in this respect.
Opening - the computer can't innovate yet (although it can be used to help in innovation), but it does have an up-to-date opening book, and will play as good an opening as has ever been played by the best players.
This leaves the middle game (which also expands somewhat to the end of the opening and beginning of the ending). In this the computer plays tactically better than the human.
So we have (end) endings, which are played perfectly, openings, which, discounting an innovative new opening, it plays as well as the best players up to today have ever played, and it is probably tactically better in the middle game. So where does that leave the chess grandmaster? Well, the old tried and true innovation in an opening can always work - it's helped human top players beat other human top players. Barring an innovative new opening, that leaves strategy, specifically, middle game strategy. There are some things computers have always been bad at such as gauging the importance of passed pawns, playing closed games and so forth. That is the method the computer can be beat with currently. I don't think it will last forever though, in the next few decades I think it will become more and more rare for a human to beat a computer, it being more likely that there will be a draw, or even a loss.
Been watching the 9-ball championship??
This is the constant claim of the meaning of computers outpacing humans at chess, and it's complete BS.
Machines have been outpacing humans in various endeavours for years. Eventually computers will be powerful enough and well programmed enough that they'll never lose (although they certainly will still draw).
Big deal. Either show me the sprinter who can beat a formula 1 or show me the movement to claim there are no longer human champions in speed. I don't see either of those, so I don't see why it should matter for a mental game.
I see no reason why we should care if computers can someday see all possible positions 35 moves out. Chess isn't about that. Chess is a game of reason, of insight, of spacial perception, of memory, of stamina (you try concentrating on one thing for 6 hours), and of emotion. Seeing forcing variations a dozen moves out is rarely part of the game for humans, and plenty of players have risen to the top of the game almost never calculating beyond 2 or 3 moves out. Giving a machine an 800HP engine and wheels takes absolutely nothing away from the human accomplishment of mastering the game.
There has been a chess message board discussion where the author of the article mooted his ideas last week. I write for ChessBase and worked on both of the last big man-machine matches (Kramnik-Fritz 2002 and Kasparov-Junior 2003).
For those here who claiming obvious Deep Blue superiority over current micros because of how many chips it had and how many positions per second it looked at, some chess knowledge would help. Deep Blue only played six games and all have been analyzed to death. We know two things. One is that Deep Blue beat Kasparov and that's the only thing most people care about, the result. The other is that Deep Blue's play was far from perfect.
Years of human and computer analysis can about as close as you can to the truth in chess. With that knowledge we can compare Deep Blue's moves to those of the current top programs such as Fritz and Junior. And we have, extensively. The bottom line is that they play better in many places, the same in others, and worse only in very few. The overall level of play by the micros in the same positions from the Deep Blue games is better. With Deep Blue in pieces that is the only way to compare the quality of their chess. Positions per second is interesting and not irrelevant, but time marches on and knowledge is important too.
While the humans in these matches obviously have some interest in saying that the program they are playing is the strongest, hundreds of other analysts don't. And Kasparov and Kramnik aren't going to make fools of themselves by recommending moves that could be easily shown to be inferior.
Kasparov played some of the most inconsistent and nervous chess of his life in the pressure-cooker match against Deep Blue in 1997. He resigned in a drawn position for the only time in his career and Deep Blue's other win, in the final game, came in a total mental collapse by Kasparov and was the shortest loss of his career in a serious game. All credit to the Deep Blue team, mission accomplished and all that, but it wasn't the greatest chess.
Meanwhile, humans studied and learned. Kasparov's attempts to baffle Deep Blue by playing intentionally inferior moves was ill-advised. That era was over, he just didn't know it. But computers still have their weaknesses, as Kramnik showed in the first half of the Bahrain match.
The top programs today running on the fastest micro hardware available play better chess than Deep Blue '97. But the top humans play better, and smarter, against them than Kasparov did in 97.
Ill be impressed when they have a computer that can beat me at chess, write a sonnet, cook up lunch, play fetch with a dog, ponder a sunset, drive a car, change a diaper, laugh at groucho marx, and wonder if it has a soul.
I believe the correct word in this case is 'useless'...
However, noting that the state-space size is large isn't really a very useful observation, since chess programs these days don't try to map out the entire tree of possible outcomes. Instead, they operate on neurodynamic programming techniques, which basically try to extract which "features" of the game are important and weigh those features to decide which moves to make. This significantly reduces the complexity of the system, but requires that the person writing the program have some intuition about which "features" are important. In chess, for example, these include such things as material balance, piece mobility, king safety, and other positional factors. A period of training is usually required as well, where basically the computer goes over a lot of games that grandmasters have played and tries to "learn" how to weigh the different features in order to choose the optimal move.
For those who are interested in reading further about this (yeah, yeah, this is Slashdot, if people can't RTFA what are the odds they'll want to pick up a book? :) ) a good place to start would be Chapter 6 of Bertsekas' "Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control".
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
It will be a draw. It pays better than loosing, and why risy a defeat when you can get a draw. All GMs of the world are doing that and, if the computer is really smart, it will do the same...
Wasn't this pretty much settled when Kasparov got his ass kicked by Deep Blue in '96, then again in '97?
In the age old battle of Man vs. Server, man has crushed his opponent once again.
I mean, machines have beaten us for a long time.
We're not complaining about cars going faster than us. That's why it's still exciting to watch the Olympics 100-meters.
I don't care one bit about man vs. machine in chess.
All I care is man vs. man.
Your first quote references Kasparov vs Computer
Your second quote references "strongest humans"
Basically, what you post states that computers are getting better via one person, but a few/many/some people that are getting better vs the computers. Therefore, no necessary contradiction.
Nowhere referenced is Kasparov vs the other guys.
We could take it as a given that Kasparov is better than all the other guys, but I reject that arguement. On the flip side, I also reject an arguement that says the other guys are better than than Kasparov because they are doing progressively doing better against the computers.
There are a couple of posts above re: pitting a computer against a more "technical player" than Kasparov. I think this could be interesting.
In short, no. The statements are not contradictory. Kasparov is not plural.
(BTW... in deference to the people that bitched about people being sexist, I mean "guys" to reference men AND dames. We cool on that?)
I think it will be several years before anyone builds anything as strong as Deep Blue II. At that point, the top grandmasters will have something to worry about. For now, the claims that PC programs like Fritz are as strong as DB2 was are mostly marketing hype.
For more info, see Deep Blue designer Feng-Hsiung Hsu's book "Building Deep Blue", about the work that went into the machine and how the Kasparov matches went.
"Thus the top seven in the July 2003 SSDF list were all various versions of Fritz or Shredder, running on the most powerful hardware used by SSDF members (256MB Athlon 1200 MHz)"
I wanna see Matthew Broderick play tic-tac-toe against it.
I disagree with you--and your anthropologist friend :)--on this issue.
There have actually been matriarchial societies. Though they have been few and obscure. I think the reason history was mostly patriarchial is because POWER rules! And regardless of how you look at it, men had more power than women back then. This is especially true since physical power (as opposed to mental) was the only thing that mattered before. Needless to say, women simply were inferior to men when it came to physical power.
You can see what I mean when you look at econopolitical systems. The past was ruled by elitist systems (this is still true today but not as badly as the past). And elitist systems usually mean that one person, or one family, or one ethnicity, or one region, or one profession, ruled over others. Since men had more physical power (and this is all that mattered back then, before the advent of science and stuff), men ruled women--simple as that.
As far as women not being good at something like chess, it may have more to do with the environment and discrimination than anything else. One reason could be that women just aren't interested in games like chess (just like how they aren't really into certain computer games). In addition, women in most of the world (I'm talking a massive majority) are treated as inferiors to men. Even Russia/USSR, where a lot of grandmasters come from, did not empower women. So what you get in the world is that only a small percentage of women actually play chess.
I'm not saying that you will get equal number of men and women at the top. But what you should see is far more women in the top rankings. The present listings have very few. I think this will increase.
Your football vs cooking analogy is misleading because football is a physical activity. Women will always be worse off than men and hence sports like football will be dominated by men. Chess isn't physical so that restriction isn't presnet...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
How did so many get trolled off their asses so hard by this post?
I, for one, welcome our chess-computer overlords.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Hey i am a ... hold on let me check.... Man, and i can swear to you that i am ... hold on let me look up that word... retarded, it only took me 40 minutes to find that page in the dictionary, they should put those words in some kind of order, i mean shouldn't the q's and u's be together what kind of logic doesn't do that?
I should point out that I'm a large number theorist
You are obviously not a chess player. No chess game at GM level gets played to the end. Once someone establishes sufficient material or positional advantage, the opponent resign. You don't have to compute all the possible moves to win at chess. You just have to analyze the current openings which( are already analyzed till move 10 to 20 generally )and find novelties. Then, your opponent will start moving into time trouble because he has to come up with ad hoc responses and his repertoire will be of no use anymore. Since you already know what the best responses to your moves should be, any other move played by the opponent can be exploited to achieve positional or material advantage. Computers are already powerful enough to do this. But, since the world champion has already lost to a compuer nobody is interested in investing big money to prove the point again which was already proved. But, humans don't have to be ashamed of losing to a computer at chess. That's like comparing an athlete with an F-16. Who will win?
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
it only took 16 top-level comments until somebody injected a go thread in a chess story. why does this always happen and so quickly? we all know that go programs are not comparatively as good as chess programs. this is a chess story. yawn.
Doesnt anyone agree with me? The robots are evolving in their own way...
The computers may have more precise tactics and a better endgame, but the humans are having more fun.
The computer is not capable of playing chess games for the price of beer, getting shitfaced, and having fun at it.
And that is the bottom, final line on man versus computer in chess.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Jeez. And I thought only skinny nerds played chess... but this Kasparov dude is not only ace chess player, but very strong too? What's he doing with the 'puter then? Smashing it to pieces with a well-placed sucker punch? I'd like to see him duke it out with Arnold!
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Bobby Fischer (sp?) once said that, "Chess is dead." I think he meant that because computers can play chess (better than most human players), and with things like chess databases, what's the point anymore?
Well, this is what I think will happen: One day, someone will build an enormous cluster of computers just to solve this problem. It'll have zillions of terabytes of storage, and computers will be put to the task of computing every possible move that the computer considers relevant. In other words, blatantly stupid moves, or those that lead to situations that a normal computer can figure out quickly "on the fly" will not be included. But otherwise, entire games will be computed to the point that no matter how you start and what moves you play, the computer will always win because it "knows" nearly every possibility by heart and will therefore will "force" you into a pre-specified set (a very LARGE set, but a set nonetheless) of moves. It will do this by simply looking in a huge lookup table. It will serve as a worldwide chess server, and thousands of people could simultaneously play against it. In the course of doing so, the computer will throw away information that is excessive and will store new relevant information that it must compute. Essentially, it would be a learning machine, and it would never forget a mistake or a good move.
When this happens, all the best chess minds in the world, working together as a team and taking a year to make each move, would not be able to beat a computer.
There are not more chess combinations than atoms in the known universe. There are billions of chess combinations. That's blatantly wrong.
Where is bobby fischer when you need him?
The last human World Champion that died in the middle of the match had never lost to a computer. The guys name was Dr. Marion Tinsly, and he used to say: "Chinook was programmed by Jonathan, but I am programmed by God."
It's mainly about a checkers program, but not one with huge amounts of human strategy and catalogued moves programmed in. Rather, it's a program which was given the barest mechanics of the game, and was designed to teach itself. The authors of the program weren't expert checkers players, but their creation learned to play well enough to beat most people.
Lots of what's in there relates to chess as well, but it's an excellent read either way.
A human player may, in the same amount of time, only actually evaluate a few dozen board possibilities before making a single move, The human player can somehow eliminate even *considering* 99.9% of the possibilities, and even then the human often doesn't fair too badly, especially considering the odds against him.
Until computers can pull off this sort of "magic"*, no computer can ever be considered a match for a human player. It's no more astounding that a computer can occasionally (or even usually) beat a human at chess by considering more moves than a human player does than it is astounding that a pocket calculate can show you the value of pi to 8 decimal places with a single keystroke. That's not intelligence, just raw computation. Put another way, it's no more suprising than the fact that a heavyweight wrestler of lesser skill would have a good chance at being able to take down a more skilled featherweight.
* Clarke's law says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (and the corallory which says that magic is always indistinguishable from some sufficiently advanced technology).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are hypotheses that a quantum computer with still greater abilities might be built one day in the distant future. This machine would have the ability to solve "NP-complete" problems quickly. However, even if such a machine was constructed, this wouldn't help either. Chess (or a generalization of chess to an nxn board), is EXPTIME-complete, which means it provably takes exponential time to find the best chess move. So, essentially, we are screwed as far as brute-forcing chess.
Maybe some clever mathematician will be able to prove some properties about chess that might reduce the search space enough to make a brute force search feasible, but don't hold your breath.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I never thought of it that way. Wow. That's an interesting way of looking at the differences. A slow, parallel computation device (i.e. brain) vs fast, linear computation device (i.e. computer). I never looked at it that way but it makes a lot of sense.
I guess one result of this view is that IF computers can compute in parallel* they will totally destroy the human brain.
* note: modern day notion of parallelism is very primitive compared to the brain...so the computers aren't really "parallel" yet...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Note that changing the program between games is generally not considered cheating unless it is specifically proscribed, as I believe is the case in the current match.
. . . but did Sonas consider his argument when Kasparov and Kramnik go to that great chessboad in the sky? If both were hit by a bus tomorrow, would the world's best chess computers' ratings immediately drop below the former #3 human?
How about the "data" he collected:
Includes all events, where each side had at least 20 minutes total for all their moves, where a computer played at least two games against humans with FIDE ratings of 2700 or more. Does not include any games against humans with FIDE ratings below 2700.
. . . on Tuesday when the ambient temperature was less than 20C during the transit of Venus. As Mark Twain said, "lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Seems to me that if you're gonna use SSDF and FIDE ratings at all, just plot the curves of humans vs. machines, fit a couple of nice equations, and extrapolate into the future.
I think that Sonas is making a critical mistake here. Quantum computers are not far off. We'll probably see them in universities in 40 years. Once quantum computers exist, chess is over. Nothing can beat a quantum chess player, not even itself, for the simple reason that it's mathematically impossible. The question of which is a better chess player will become irrelevant.
Melissa <3
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
There is an interesting article at How Stuff Works that explains how chess programs work: article. Also, here is a link to a related story.
good night.
How about if you built a neural network and trained it vs humans?
If anybody out there is looking for a great chess website, i recommend www.redhotpawn.com .
p.s. i don't have any interest in the site except for being a satisfied user.
Is that Kasparov is a sucker for punishment :-). It takes some guts to not slink away with one's tail between one's legs after a pounding like Deep Blue's.
Says who, Doctor?
Ummm... there is also the reality that women and men think differently. The typical man will have an improved sense of spacial relationships, whereas the typical woman will have stronger language centre skills (for example).
Chess is very much about being able to envisage the spatial relationships of the board many moves in advance, and as such, it is highly probably that men would on the whole do better at it than women.
The bigger issue is why activities that are dominated by men (such as football or chess) are considered of greater importance than activities that are dominated by women (bringing up children?)?
cheers
Sara
yes; female, a slashdotter, a geek and a gamer; plus I can play chess and read a map...
Many great inventions of the past were by women who then let a man release their invention because a woman simply wouldn't be taken seriously and it wouldn't be socially acceptable for them to do so.
I would prefer open-minded, intelligent realism, and you obviously do not. Is this flexible yet critical? I think it is obvious that your statement is foolish and malevolent. One must consider straightforwardness versus propaganda. Is this open-minded? I think it is obvious that your statement is dangerous and foolish. But there is a flexible yet critical justice, and your argument would reject anything involved with it. Think about the stupidity, malignant and orthodox, and how it compares with honest straightforwardness.
Human makes opening move.
Computer: Mate in 63. You lose.
Christ man, you sound like someone TRYING to be stupid. You're just trying to get your signature some visibility, for whatever that gets you.
So then let me answer your question with another question: How can you be so stupid, yet sound even stupdier?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Well well, maybe our best human is still competing with the best computer, but in general I think if we held a gigantic chess match of all humans playing agains all computers we would clearly lose.
... ehhh lets say ... WALKING.
Now that we know that this war is lost, why don't we stop playing chess at all and start focussing on,
Ha ha! You stupid machines! At the soles of my feet. Eat my dust as you see my speed off to the horizon...!
-jsilence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
... there is also the reality that women and men think differently. The typical man will have an improved sense of spacial relationships, whereas the typical woman will have stronger language centre skills (for example).
;)
Yeah that's true to some extent but we don't really know a whole lot about it. For example, what makes one deviate? Also, I am unhappy with the lack of emphasis placed on environment--too much genetics and too little environment...
Chess is very much about being able to envisage the spatial relationships of the board many moves in advance...
We don't know about that. I don't think anyone has done a study to indicate that. You may be right but I'm not too confident yet.
The bigger issue is why activities that are dominated by men (such as football or chess) are considered of greater importance than activities that are dominated by women (bringing up children?)?
The answer is fairly obvious--is it not? Since nearly all societies are patriarchial, activities by men will be valued more.
Sara... yes; female, a slashdotter, a geek and a gamer; plus I can play chess and read a map...
Are you sure you aren't a man?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
sure computers will get better than us at chess. but we're multi-purpose machines, not chess computers.
Logic, macros, and more
I believe that raising children is the single most important act in any civilization -- for both men and women. Though women have the primary responsibility. It is a shame that our culture has lost so much of the respect for that act that it once had. I do not think that our children are being raised as well as they should be. And I do not think that women who undertake that task are being accorded the respect they should rightfully have.
(P.S. You can read a map?!? Well, I can ask for directions. Of course, I choose not to.)
i play 9-ball competitively. if youre suggesting that the women on tv are the top 9-ball players, youre wrong. a strong amateur male player (such as a local champion) can typically match a top-ranked professional female player.
whether this is due to a larger population of male players or some innate difference is open for debate. however theres a definite difference in shot selection between the male and female pros.
in any case, the women are on tv more because they look better on tv and they have a single well-managed players association (unlike the men).
On a related note, here's a short story that appeared on Kuro5hin about paying an infinite game of Go with a horribly wounded angel.
Deals with the concept of NP-hard problems, too!
Jeff Sonas assertion remind me of Iain Banks "Culture" series where most of the universe is ruled by the Minds (some kind of omniscient AIs).
He says that surprisingly even the Minds can't beat the best humans (OK the best amongst trillions) in specific areas.
Incidently I believe the computational approach of computers would never beat very intuitive players like Bobby Fisher.
http://www.transparency.org
There you go getting on your thermodynamic high horse but screw up big time when you confuse energy requirements with some sort of cataclysmic power surge. Very silly, you're a big numbers guy with no patience.
w.r.t. solving chess, there are such things as tree pruning and of course not all states have to be stored, they are merely searched. Then of course there's the prospect of additional mathematical optimizations.
are merely programs that are arranged in a spacial grid such that they have neighbors.
The behavior of the program is limited the state of it's neighbors. Often these things are arranged in a grid of pixels, for example, and a cell might have the rule of being on if exactly half it's neighbors are on, and off otherwise. Or any rule you might think. They exhibit very interesting behavior.
Steven Wolfram, a young brilliant physicist and cosmologist that dropped out of science in the mid eightees, had made discoveries back then about interesting characteristics of cellular automata. He dropped out and continued his study, making a living selling the software he made for his own research needs, Mathematica. It's kind of a good geek legend like one on old.
Just last year he came out with the results of his work in "A New Kind of Science" which studies the patterns created by cellular phenomenon, and which includes admission that Worfram really believes the whole world comes down to cellular automata.
The idea that this theory would mean a computer could simulate people comes from the fact that cellular automata are easily simulated on a computer. Of course, that doesn't mean the computer could beat the human, it's running a simulation, one layer removed, it's like a VM, implimenting the machine all over again (as cellula automata) and then using it.
-pyrrho
It means that if a system is in the state S1 at the moment t1, then at a later time t2 it can be in multiple states S2,S2',S2",... i.e. the state evolution function is a multi-valued function (like square root of 4, which is +2 or -2).
what if our minds are quantum computers, then normal computers would never be able to match them, in all liklihood. There are a lot of unknown possibilities like that.
-pyrrho
Some of us can count to 1023 just using our fingers.
...warmfully welcome our computer chess overlords
however it is no match against me when it comes to kickboxing.
And other stupid sayings.
The idea that ever-increasing brute force can be held off by an almost flat line of inspiration is just a joke. But the result (that computers will be able to beat any human) will be no more vaild than entering a 1500cc Harley-Davidson in the olympic marathon: so the machine wins, big whoop!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
And neither will they ever need more than 640K of RAM.
The problem with using empirical evidence is that it's dealing with then. This is now. In the future we will have quantum computers with enough storage space to calculate (or just lookup) a winning path from any possible position.
Computers will inevitably surpass meat brains. The real question is: when, and what sort of computer?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
why don't they give up on making chess programs and work on something important like a progam that can beat an amateur Go player? (www.usgo.com)
-SaNo
He starts by comparing the SSDF computer ratings with the FIDE Elo rating, and claims that they would lead to the conclusion that computers will surpass humans in a couple of months. This is non-sense. Nobody has ever claimed that. The SSDF ratings always come with the disclaimer that they are only based on computer vs computer games, so that the ratings cannot be compared to human ratings.
Then he refutes this claim that noone has ever made by citing the results of human-vs-computer matches in the last 15 years. We see draws in the last 5 years against opponents that had gradually increasing ratings, who probably were taking the matches increasingly more seriously. And that altogether had 49 games. Sorry, I can hardly believe that Sonas is a statistician if he is deriving his claim from such a small sample.
All we can say is that these matches in the last 5 years do not show that computers will be clearly better than humans in a few years. But they do nothing to destroy the very strong evidence to the contrary, either. Evidence gathered in 30 years of computer chess development, e.g. showing that a doubling in computing power leads to about 60 points ELO rating increase.
Raising children IS the most important thing. However, due to capitalism (and other elitist systems), you end up undervaluing the luxurious and non-essential stuff. For example, ever notice how farming is one of the worst sectors to be in (low profits, etc), whereas non-essential sectors like manufacturing do far better. One can hardly claim that food is not important but one is willing to spend more on non-essential things...a severe human flaw in the modern world...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
You of course realize that the top few hundred professional cooks are also all male...
Some women are good at it, but at the peak professional level the men are the ones making the big bucks... Maitre chef de cuisine.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Well, that's just it. At this stage, the worry is more fluff than substance, though. Chess is a very specific problem domain: it's taken an enormous amount of effort to build computers that are capable of playing a superior game against superior players.
Chess is considered to be a particularly cerebral pursuit, so the symbolism of machines victorious over man is particularly poignent. A computer who beats superior human players has either proved that pursuit is less cereberal than it seems, or chess is a rigorously definable problem domain like so many others.
Now, build me a computer that can think -- and we'll have something.
Farming is a bad sector to work in because of oversupply, over capacity and hyper productivity. Today the US only has about 3% of its population in agriculture. Why would a profession that needs so few people yet still requires such hard backbreaking work be desireable?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I have trouble beating my TI-89 calculator at chess!
Against most of us 'normal' chess players computers have been able to beat us each and every time now for many years. This has certainly not diminished the game in anyway but rather given the oppertunity to have interesting games (usually only if the skill level is turned down!) in the absence of a human opponent.
Even 'chess genius' on my PDA can beat me most times, a far cry from my childhood when a chess computer was large and bulky and could be beaten each and every time, such as by making an obvious move of sacking a piece for positioal advantage.
I can tell you one thing, around my house Fritz is definitely winning. I ceded in the man vs machine battle a long time ago.
We just gave up the idea that we can beat them as Kasparov lost to a computer and that is engough to prove that computers have surpassed humands.
Your misinformed. The best Deep Fritz could recently score against Kramnik was a 4-4 tie, with Kramnik winning the second and third games before falling behind in later games probably due to fatigue.
Beating a computer is easy. I do it myself sometimes. The hard part is beating a computer on a specific date, at a certain time under tournament conditions with the world watching - and Kramnik proved it against a 8 way Xeon machine searching around 2 million nodes (moves) a second. Can Kramnik calculate more or even close to this? Hardly.
The point isn't that Deep Blue's search depth is around 100 million nodes/second and that Kramnik's match was somehow inferior. The point is that proper anti-computer chess strategy evaporates a computer's tactical advantage gained through brute-forcing the position if a reasonable level of discipline is maintained once peices start coming off the table. This is why you frequently see computers in middlegame positions wildly swing their game assessment from (+4.66 to -14.66) as a new search depth is reached in a position an intermediate chess player wouldn't play into. Yes, chess is a finite problem space but that space is enormous, approximately 10^150 legal positions and that's more positions then atoms thought to exist in the known universe. The fact is with the exception of breakthrough in quantum computing and assuming Moore's law holds, the heat death of the sun would come before a chess computer could even calculate 0.000000000000001% of that space.
So computers are great for short-term tactical finesses that are easily calculated but are useless middlegame players. They are also useless opening players, but they get the advantage of having the opening book.
so are you arguing that you can't expect results of empirical evidence to support what will happen in the future ???!!
Just use PKZIP.
I think the real question/statement is not "Man Vs Machine In Chess", but "Engineers vs Chess Players", by Engineers i meant coders, chess analysts, and everybody else that has significant role in the process of creating the AI.
>so are you arguing that you can't expect results of empirical evidence to support what will happen in the future
I'm arguing that you can't always use empirical evidence to predict the future. You can use it, for example, to predict the asymptotic performance points for human athletes, because we are limited by design. You can't use it (as the author does) to say that computers will never become clearly superior to humans at chess.
Think of it this way. If someone back in 1955 had used empirical evidence taken from valve based computers to show that computers would never be able to draw ten thousand textured triangles 30 times a second on a 1280x1024 LCD screen, they would have been completely reasonable and credible... and totally wrong.
In this case, if you want to argue that silicon CISC/RISC based computers will never be clearly superior to human chess masters, well, we can argue that, but it's a different argument. At some point in the future, I expect "calculate all possible configurations for a chess board" will be a standard feature in benchmarking tests for quantum computers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"For now, the claims that PC programs like Fritz are as strong as DB2 was are mostly marketing hype."
This sentence is not true. Mircos are currently superiour to Deep Blue based on analysis of the few games Deep Blue played. There is no other evidence to go on then these games (the positions per second is irrelevant).
I wouldn't always bet on intuition. In Connect Four, the player who goes second can force a win every time.
Uh. Not worth a read, a waste of time. Summary: author says God cannot be omnipotent and infallible if humans have free will- coz if God knows what we will do, we don't have free will, and since we have free will (author doesn't prove that convincingly either) God is fallible etc etc. The author also follows with some insulting remarks too.
e -slit_experime nt
Philosophers and other people have done arguments like that or better, far more efficiently and elegantly - e.g. "can God create a rock he cannot lift" and so on. Some have managed to do so without the trolling and insults too.
The universe is more than what we understand so far, and this guy thinks it's so simple?
Explain this (and I mean thoroughly):
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubl
And also explain the first observation every scientist makes - self awareness.
What if God lends/puts a bit of himself to/into each human?
Or arranges it so that if you, a glimmer of light, choose accordingly, you end up with constructive interference - light. But if you choose otherwise, you end up in destructive interference and darkness.
It's probably not quite as simple as that either but I'm willing to bet the universe isn't as narrow as those popular philosophical arguments seem to assume.
If it were that simple, why is there a "you" or "I"?
... when I'm at the next Wolfram Church meeting... :) seriously, I have read A New Kind of Science and fell in love with cellular automata back in the 80's as I fell in love with other recursive and feedback related phenomenon. But I havn't followed Wolfram closely, so I only know the hype.
Tell me, what about him being a genius. Is he?
(It's possible to be a genuis and also steal the work of others... basically if not all the good stuff is stolen) Wouldn't make him less of an ass if what you say is true, but I'm curious if you also would debunk his repuatation as something of a uniquely brilliant (if eccentric) mind.
???
-pyrrho
in any case, the women are on tv more because they look better on tv and they have a single well-managed players association (unlike the men).
They're just more fun to watch, and I don't think the fact that they 'look better on TV' has anything to do with it. For some reason, the women's personalities make watching much more enjoyable than watching the men. Don't ask me why... it's just my observation and does not carry over to other sports, like golf, etc.
As has already been pointed out, there was quite a difference between the hardware these computer programs were running on, as Jeff Sonas doesn't really consider in his article. As far as I recall reading, the Deep Blue that beat Kasparov, was actually running on an algorithm 100 times faster than the one Fritz, which drew Kasparov in a match earlier this year, were using. I'm PRETTY convinced, that if you put one of todays best programs (there has been a huge development in the actual strength of the programs since Deep Blue) on a killer machine like IBM did back then (just one that at least equals the one Deep Blue was running on), any human being would be completely outclassed in a match...
"due to capitalism (and other elitist systems)"
Capitalism is anti-elitist, especially compared to to socialism which grants almost divine powers to elites.
"you end up undervaluing the luxurious and non-essential stuff"
No, under a system of freedom, peoeple are able to evaluate things for their real value.
"end up undervaluing the luxurious and non-essential stuff. "
Is that why socialist regimes like to execute farmers by the tens of millions in engineered famines?
Now that SETI has decided to allow out-projects, I would like to see a chess program based on that. I want to see the highest chess rating known to man! :-D
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The only way to prove computers will never do what people do is to show that our minds are products of actions which can only exist a human structure.
e x.php?category= AI%20Philosophy
Since chess playing is done only by systems with wires and states between the wires I just don't see where anyone can ever say there will never be another (circuit) similiar or as functional as humans.
It is so obvious we are wired together.
Any doubt about an objects ability to make choices that is not human is sheer ignorance of the last 500 years of scientific research.
Our evolving algorithms coupled with our computers hardward advancement will surpass human intelligence in extreme magnitudes.
Most anti-A.I. voices are fueled by fear of something stronger and smarter than them and ignited from lack of study in the field.
"We already have deceptive error prone computers- they are called humans"
My AI philosophies:
http://www.handheldwarez.com/z/ind
I wrote up a long message yesteday but ran into the 25-post limit :( I'll keep it brief. You dont' address any of my points. I'm talking about the VALUE of an activity or good. I'm not saying that people should all work in farming or that the US population should be more involved in it. All I'm saying is that when a necessity, like food, is valued so little compared to luxury goods, it questions the value system of society. Of course a capitalist will claim the nature of scarcity and revert ot arguments that you put forth (oversupply, etc). But, capitalism itself claims that oversupply shouldn't exist.
BTW, there was a typo in my original post. I think the word 'not' is missing...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
http://www.arimaa.com/
"I'm saying is that when a necessity, like food, is valued so little compared to luxury goods, it questions the value system of society. "
This also shows how capitalism is anti-elite. In capitalism, the people decide the value of something. That is how it should be. In socialism, you have "values" made up arbitrarily by elites and then forced on everyone who has to put up or shut up.
Your food example only shows you are out of touch with the real value of the item in question.