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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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Subsequently, Kasparov created a positional advantage on the human side with
a very strong finger pointed at the reset button to which Fritz didn't have an answer.
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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.
Kasparov created a positional advantage on the queen side with a very strong pawn structure to which Fritz didn't have an answer.
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Well, what can poor Fritz, a cold emotionless computer, do when a handsome russian stallion of a man puts his pawn on the queen's side? Of course he didn't have an answer
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
For those interested in AI game programming without the insane complexities of chess, Nine Men's Morris is fun. Also a frequently researched topic in AI.
Play here.
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People learn faster than machines.
No, they just saw this stuff on TV. Once Fritz gains access to the Star Trek archives he won't again be so easily distracted and outplayed by Kasparov using his secret weapon: "how do you feel?".
Kasparov: pwned!
Programmer: No way! Look at my ping. It was lag!
I play a little chess. When I was younger I had a 1600 rating. I wanted to play because I was humilated at getting beat by the chessmaster on Nintendo. So I practiced and finally became good enough to beat the computer (albiet only a Nintendo) What I learned then (and seems to be common knowledge among chess players) is that when playing a computer, you stand a much better chance if you keep all your pawns on the board and manouver your pieces behind them. Computers think about the game in a very different manner, and I think eight pawn chess highlights where their weakness lies. They do not have a plan. They do not start the game with a long term plan to the ending. I believe that in the past, Garry was a true sportsman and did not play eight pawn chess against the strongest computers. He played real chess. He played what he would play against another Grandmaster. I really think he could probably beat the computer almost all of the time by playing eight pawn chess.
For those who receive ESPN/ESPN2, the sports network has televised all three matches and will televise the fourth on Tuesday at 1:00pm. I've watched all three games on there, and it's actually very entertaining, if only for the humor of seeing history's greatest chess player in action and wearing those stupid X3D goggles. I just hope Garry can pull off Game 4 with a win.
porp
Kinda like how your average Slashdotter watching the crowd go wild over Barry Bonds breaking the home run record is secretly thinking, "Oh sure, but can he put together a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes?"
because they bring out so many people who bitterly complain and make excuses and want to challenge Fritz to a game of poker or something because it would give the human the advantage.
This is far from the end of our species, chill out. Even if we are worse at chess than the computers, it doesn't make the experience of being human meaningless. It doesn't mean we will be welcoming our new robot overlords any time soon.
Anyway, would it really be so bad, if AIs started getting better than humans at a lot of things? I think that in the end, we could take our greatest joy as a species in knowing that we created something better than ourselves.
Of course, that is an issue so seperated from computer chess, that many of you are probably complaining to yourselves.
That's how I feel when I read the excuse making and naysaying.
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Crudely Drawn Games
This gives a nice introduction to Go and AI and why it is so hard to play for a computer.
Does Fritz learn from today's defeat... or could Kasparov repeat today's win simply by repeating today's move sequence on Tuesday?
Does Kasparov play human beings anymore? or is he too good for us?
To quote (from memory) the online commentator Mig Greengard:
"If X3D Fritz lacks a clear target it plays like a braindamaged lemur"
As Fritz moved its pieces back and forth throughout the game, Kasparov could make several free moves. That isn't brilliant, that's just making use of the other guys mistakes. Kasparov dominated the whole game, while Fritz had no clue at all what to do. According to one of its makers, X3D Fritz reached a new record of reading deeply (19 ply if I'm not mistaken) since the number of possible moves was so small in the cramped space they were building up their positions. This, however, didn't help a bit and I had a few giggles over bishops and knights moving away and then back again to the very same place they were coming from.
Only at the very end did Fritz realize it was losing, throughout the whole game it couldn't see what was glaringly obvious to the audience.
I've been told that this was proper anti-computer chess. The cramped position makes it tremendously difficult for a computer program to play properly while a human can easily see what's to be done.
All in all, it wasn't brilliant, Fritz just didn't have a clue
What am I discussing all this chess for? Let me get back to KGS...
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
I played chess all the time with pals about 10 years ago. We were all at about the same level of bad. I thought I would prove my chess-skilz one day and played some guy at the local coffeeshop. After 3 moves, I was checkmated. My middle eastern opponent turned to my friend and said, "Your friend is stupid. I will not play him again.", swept all the pieces off the board, got up, shook his head and left.
That stung. So You Go Gary! I must live vicariously through you! Kick some ass! Then I must go back to OS X gnuChess which mocks me every time I play, "You are stupid. I will not play you again."
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 simple wall-shaped opponent pressed right against the net, with a large enough surface area, will beat any opponent. Well, maybe with a hole in there for serving.
A chess game with a 19x19 board would send a computer into shock too.
Less so than Go, since with Go the number of possible moves at each junction in time is larger than in chess - Go on a chess-sized board still features a larger search space than chess. Just like 110 in binary is less than 110 in decimal.
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Al Gore: You already know Stephen Hawking. Also with us is Nichelle Nichols a.k.a. Commander Uhura.
Nichols: Incoming transmission from MCI one rate department. It sounds like a limited time offer.
Gore: Tell them I'm in the tub! To my left you'll recognise Gary Gygax, inventor of dungeons and dragons.
Gygax: Greetings! It's a...[rolls dice.]...pleasure to meet you!
Gore: And our summer intern, Deep Blue. The world's foremost chess playing computer.
Deep Blue: Bishop to knight 4.
Gore: Not all missions can be solved with chess, Deep Blue. Someday you'll understand that.
It's a sad world when one has an inferiority complex against a database.
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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Nine Men's Morris has been solved by Ralph Gasser in 1996 (Draw).
So has Qubic (4x4x4 Tic-Tac-Toe) by Patashnik O in 1980. (First Player Win)
Connect Four by James Allen in September 1998. (First Player Win)
Let's see John W. Romein and Henri E. Bal from that wonderful games research group in U of Alberta solved Awari in 2002. (Draw)
Read Victor Allis' PhD thesis for a good overview on finding game theoretic results of games. He invented the proof-number search technique that he used to (re)solve Qubic and Connect-Four. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~victor/thesis.html
Nine Men's Morris is not researched actively anymore, but Ralph Gasser's paper is often cited in any paper that deals with artificial intelligence in games.
Of course, even though the game might already be solved, that does not mean that it is not fun to play...
Sure, but:
The X3D technology fools the brain into seeing 3D. I wonder how much this 50% lack of visual stimuli changes the way the chessmaster's brain works here.
No effect whatsoever, because there is no "50% lack of visual stimuli". Anything that flickers fast enough is perceived by the retina itself as a solid unchanging image.
The "critical flicker fusion rate" that determines "what is fast enough" varies from about 40 frames per second to about 80 frames per second, depending on image brightness, ambient illumination, the particular individual viewing it, etc.
TV in the US, for instance, flickers at about 60 hertz, but in non-flourescent ambient illumination, most people don't notice. In Europe the rate is 50 hertz, and people frequently do notice. And some people get headaches from computer monitors that flicker even at 72 hertz, especially under flourescent lights.
I used to regularly get annoyed at PC monitors in conference rooms flickering at 60 hertz, when others didn't notice -- so I'd bring up display preferences and set it at the highest refresh rate. Until it occured to me that I was sabotaging people who needed to interface it to the overhead projector at 60 hertz. Oops! :-) But I digress.
Movies are displayed at 48 hertz (although only 24 unique frames per second; they are "double-shuttered" to double the frame rate). Cartoons sometimes have as few as 6 unique frames per second (although they are displayed at movie or tv flicker rates) because that's about the threshold for perceiving continuous motion. Lots of issues, lots of thresholds.
But even if the 3D viewing shows perceptible flicker, there isn't any issue of "50% lack of visual stimuli". Both eyes are constantly receiving information.
I could imagine that any number of things about this 3D gadget could distract a chess player -- but so does cigar smoke (a trick used to advantage in chess matches early in the 20th century).
Years ago I used to use similar 3D goggles to play first person shooters like Quake, and it was great. It helped my game. Quake isn't chess, but 3D goggles aren't rocket science.
You can assume that, if he agreed to use this 3D setup, he was confident it wouldn't throw off his game. He does care, after all.
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"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how much I play, I'll never be as good a a wall. I played a wall once. They're fucking relentless...." --Mitch Hedberg
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