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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.
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.
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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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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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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