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Man Vs Machine In Chess - Who Is Winning?

Posted by simoniker on from the autobot-or-decepticon? dept.

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."

3 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. still by toddhunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. does the computer do a dance? by blah1019 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  3. You're absolutely wrong. by rjh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.