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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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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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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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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