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Kasparov Wins Game 3 Against X3D Fritz
Vulcao writes "Garry Kasparov just brilliantly won game 3 in the Kasparov vs. X3D Fritz chess match, which pits man against machine. Kasparov created a positional advantage on the queen side with a very strong pawn structure to which Fritz didn't have an answer. The result is now 1.5 - 1.5, and the last game will be this Tuesday, Nov. 18."
...with people saying that if the computer wins over the human it means that "That's it, here we are, computers are more intelligent than man".
Computer chess games deal with statistics and historics of previous games to decide how they will move their next turn. Usually they analyze hundreds of thousand of differents moves, even dumb ones !
When a human player take a look at the chess board, he rejects the vast majority of the possible moves and concentrate only on very few of them.
I would call that efficiency and if computers where as efficient as human, they would win easily without requiring huge processing power.
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I always wonder how long it takes in any chess thread before someone who thinks they've discovered the lost city of gold pipes up about go. And the answers they get are always the same, it's a totally different problem. We haven't built a robot to play tennis either, tennis is simply a different problem with a much much larger data set, just like go. A chess game with a 19x19 board would send a computer into shock too.
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There is a lot of relief here to me, as a spectator. The first game had Garry as white with a strong opening and everything looked good, then due to some dubious moves, it was a drawn game.
:)
The second game on Thursday had Garry as black beat pretty much from the beginning. Garry fought back very well and might have drawn the game, but then foolishly blundered which cost him the game almost immediately. You could see the frustration level just go through the roof, as he's still trying to prove that he's better than the computer, but only to be beaten by the slow, steady computer approach.
But today, he's redeemed himeself. Although the match is now tied, he has shown that he can win against the computer. I feel better.
The last game will be difficult for Garry as black. But the fact that he won an game, and didn't draw them all has got to have him elated.
Fritz has grandmasters working for them. They're not stupid and neither are the programmers...
Kasparov tried playing "anti-computer" chess against Deep Blue and got his butt handed to him. After losing to Deep Blue Kasparov really, Really, REALLY wants to beat Fritz (after helping hype him as "even better than Deep Blue"). If it were as simple as you describe, he wouldn't be wasting any time doing it now.
Obviously these kind of matches are very interesting for chess players. But I wonder if there is any other significance, in theoretic science or in the computer science depts.
In other words, why should we care who wins? I don't want to troll, but the machine vs human chess player story is getting a bit stale. If the computer wins, that will mean, what? It's such a specialized field that you can hardly call it a milestone in computer science.
A simple wall-shaped opponent pressed right against the net, with a large enough surface area, will beat any opponent.
And building a chess program to beat any opponent is pretty simple, by making all the computers pieces queen king mixtures, so they move like queens but the computer only loses if *all* its remaining pieces are in checkmate at once.
But it's generally only interesting when you restrict the computer to actually following the rules of the game.
Its ridiculous to say oooh the computer has beaten the human. Whats actually happening is that a human unassisted is being beaten by a team of humans using a tool (the computer). Computers are just tools. What this means is that us dumb humans have figured out a way to model what this really smart (well good at chess at least) human is doing. To me its about as big a deal as saying ooh the worlds strongest man just got beaten by a guy with a forklift truck.
The parent hit the nail on the head. Computers require a different strategy than human players. For instance, there was one particular move in this game that illustrates this, 18. Rb2, that is a loss of tempo against a human opponent. However, against Fritz it was a very smart move. The computer should have moved the piece on f6 then pushed its f pawn to f5 then f4, attacking Kasparov's f pawn. Moving Rb2 however had the effect of making black work a little harder to attack, apparently pushing the number of moves it needed to consider to find the advantage beyond where it was searching. Against a human player it would have had little or no effect (all the commentators were saying how Fritz was ignoring the opportunity with the f pawn), but against Fritz it made Kasparov's game much much easier.
Not a terribly convincing syllogism there. It is highly likely that Fritz is more competent against your eight pawn strategy than your Nintendo.
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The game was interesting. It resembled a classic game from the thirties with either Saemisch or Maroczy as white. It underlines the strengths of the human mind versus computers.
The annotators of the first game pointed out over and over again, that some of each player's decisions were based on the computer's looking over a few million positions, and 'knowing' that it was safe to play the kind of moves that a human's fears and instincts would have made it very uncomfortable for a human to have played (e.g., the capture of the bishop by the king in the drawn game). Games like the first two show the greatest strengths of computers: superhuman ability in positions involving the calculation of tactical complications.
The current game by contrast grave rise to a position that is possibly the greatest illustration of a human's real strengths: the ability to create closed positions where tactical calculations of severely reduced utility; creating a position where experience and 'instinct' far outweigh calculation.
In the latest game, the computer's playing, 5...a6 created a 'hole,' a 'positional weakness,' and the rest of the game was a matter of exploiting its consequences while simultaneously giving the computer no chance to balance the game neither by winning back material, nor by a compensatory attack against white's position.
To put it another way, the nature of the position allowed white to create and exploit a position where the computer's ability to look at millions of positions per second was essentially useless.
It was clever and precise play on Kasparov's part.
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Don't most chess programs include some measure of non-determinism in their move choice, precisely so this isn't possible? For instance, if two different moves are found to have scores which are "close", the computer could select one at random.
In the simplest case, there must be some random mechanism to choose which opening to play. It would be boring and weak to always use the same one.
Probably Fritz will learn from this game, but I don't think that it's necessary in order to avoid meeting exactly the same defeat.
Doesn't make him not one, either. If your parents are Japanese, it doesn't matter where you're born. You're Japanese too.
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One of the main shortcomings of these matches is calling them "man versus machine". Because that's really a misnomer and obscures the actual situation. Which is, that the Kasparov is playing a computer program that is not thinking entirely for itself. A lot of the decisions that the program makes have been pre-programmed by the team of chess experts prior to each match. It's the group of experts that evaluates the opponent and decides the general strategy of each game.
The program isn't altered in the middle of a game. But it also isn't Kasparov versus a completed chess program thinking for itself. I would go so far as to say the reprogramming during a multiple game match and the evaluation of the opponent by the chess experts is cheating. And really relegates these matches to novelties to be gawked at but not to be considered real.
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That would depend heavily on Fritz's implementation details. While others have pointed out that the game was probably added to Fritz's library, there's other implementation details that would probably make repeating a game unlikely.
For instance, a computer can think about a single move almost indefinitely (continually looking more moves ahead.) Fritz undoubtedly has certain algorithms that determine the cutoff point when it is ready to stop "thinking" and move. Fritz undoutably also spends time "thinking" during Kasparov's turn. If Kasparov were to try to duplicate a game, he would have to ensure that his moves were made at exactly the same time they were in the previous game, otherwise Fritz's thinking state would be different from the first time and it might come up with a move that is different (which would force Kasparov to deviate from the previous game.)
The better answer is that this is a computer program which defeated the current world chess champion. It's programers are likely highly intelligent and would likely have built in some mechanism for Fritz learning from its mistakes. The better question is whether the approach (as in general strategy) that Kasparov used to defeat Fritz can be duplicated. It's not unlikely that Kasparov will be able to adapt to whatever adaptations Fritz comes up with.
Now I'm not one that thinks chess is the end-all-be-all of society, but some might consider it brilliant that he was able to absolutely dumbfound the pinnical of chess technology. Yeah he made use of the other guy's mistakes... That's called "winning". Since the computer is brute forcing it's way through the chess match by trying to calculate ever possible senario per move, I consider it brilliant that he found a way to neutralize that huge advantage, even if the games was rather one-sided. Now to continue to win using the same motis operandi is cheesy simply exploitng a blindspot, but to find that blindspot [i]is[/i] brilliance in and of itself.
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He did that to maximize the number of moves that computer would have to compute to capture his king. Think about it, the possibilities are endless. Moving any piece opens up an escape hole for the King while maximizing the number of possible moves for the situation. The queen's capabilities in that position are enormous; she has a clear line of fire towards most of the squares that any piece can move to. The same is true for every piece on that formation. Again, further maximization of possibility. It's brilliant.
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A human can pick up another game and learn it, and get better at it. He/she can notice shortcuts / regularities in the way the game works that reduces the amount of thinking s/he has to do, build a higher level, meaningful way of looking at the game. You can drop a human into any novel situation and they'll similarly figure out the rules, and shortcuts.
We handle it completely differently - we rely on this ability, and chess programs look ahead some 15 or more moves, where humans supposedly top out at about 6.
Now, if you think of Kasparov making a close game with a specially written, highly-refined program with his general purpose brain, look at it as the measure of what it takes to beat our brains! 15-20 move lookahead! It validates the brains' elegant and powerful design.
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Four games is not enough to statistically show who is better, especially if they are tied after three games.
I think Kasparov still knows a lot of tricks but will not reveal many of them even if it means losing a match of just 4 games. He would know after just a game or two who is really stronger, and if the machine is limited, he woould't care to play 100% in case the next upgrade learns too much.
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Garry Kasparov just brilliantly won game 3
Did you even watch the game? Kasparov just exploited a bug in Fritz' evaluation engine. I wouldn't call that a brilliant win. (He'd make a good hacker though.)
That would be cheating, wouldn't it? It's supposed to be "Man Vs. Machine", not "Man Vs. Machine and Another Man"
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