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Kasparov Draws Game 4 and Match Against X3D Fritz
jaydee77ca writes "Garry Kasparov survived opening danger and played very precise, technical chess to draw Game 4 with black against X3D Fritz. The final match result is a 2.0 - 2.0 draw, proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived."
proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived
Sigh. Such an obviously human-biased conclusion to what is indisputably one of the great achievments of computer chess. The fact that Fritz, running on rather modest hardware, drew Kasparov, is an incredible feat. The obvious followup is that the days of a human world champion are numbered. And most likely that number is most conveniently expressed in months, not years.
Running on an Intel Xeon server with four 2.8 GHz processors.
proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived.
Didn't that already happen a few year back when he lost to Deeper Blue?
I really hate Dan Patrick.
It could only look 12-20 moves into the future, and Kasparov played in a manner to limit what the computer could see by looking ahead. Since the computer had no strategy, but rather always took the best move he could see at the moment, Kasparov could keep him blind and cornered so it didn't see anything usefull to do in the short term, so it ended up flailing about somewhat (notice where it moved a peice and then moved it right back). Then all the meanwhile he was slowly playing out a much longer strategy.
Yeah, thank goodness for my soul. I'd hate to see how badly I sucked at chess if somebody extracted my soul.
I hate this sort of thinking. If the question is, "What is it that allows humans to think abstractly and formulate efficient and creative strategies in the face of novel situations?" answering, "a soul" is just sleight of hand to avoid admitting that we don't know. Positing that every human being has a soul explains nothing, and tells us nothing that we didn't already know. Slapping a label on a phenomenon isn't the same as providing an explanation.
Now, regarding "near-infinite cycles," ask your math teacher about the logic inherent in the phrase.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
What, if any, is the difference between "simulated intelligence" and "actual intelligence"? How do you know that our brains don't function as massivlely parallel search/inference engines?
Discussions about AI usually degenerate pretty quickly into arguments about whether or not we have some invisible, intangible, God-given "soul" or "spirit" or "spark." You're use of the phrase "*miracle of real intelligence*" would lead me to guess that you'd probably come down on the side that favors such a thing.
We humans are self-aware, yet we have not yet explained the mechanism of our self-awareness. Many of us assume that it therefore cannot be explained, that it is miraculous. I think that's a poor assumption. It may be, however, that we are incapable of understanding our own self-awareness, and incapable of understanding our own intelligence. Whether that's true or not, it does not follow that other animals and even machines cannot develop intelligence.
Why is it necessary to build a machine that plays chess "*as a human does*"? It's unlikely that any two humans play chess the same way, so which human would you have the machine emulate? Wouldn't it be better to build a machine that plays chess its own way?
One thing that has been pointed out by numerous posters is the belief that the final result of the match is the result of one bad move in one of the earlier games.
This is not necessarily meaningful. Either player could have played better or worse in any of the positions that came about in the ensuing games, making the actual match results the stuff of speculation about alternate universes.
Be that as it may, two things stand out about the match. The first is that the computer opponent is actually a commercial program running on commercially available hardware and not on specialized circuitry out of a lab somewhere. This alone is a very good indicator of how far computers have come as chess players. Not too long ago (at least in geological terms), there wasn't a chess program on earth that could win against the like of me. Nowadays, by contrast, commercial desktop hardware combined with shrinkwrapped software are giving a former world-champion a run for his money.
The second point of interest in the final game is Kasparov's choice of defenses.
Kapararov is one of the world's greatest experts on the opening--someone who prepares not just against continuations but against his most likely opponents--and yet, with the game and the match on the line he, chose to not play any of the 'milder' defenses to 1.d4 (for example, trying to reprise the line of the Gruenfeld he played against Karpov in one of their matches) but instead chose to play the black side of the Queen's gambit accepted.
When I was growing up and studying, the queen's gambit accepted was known to offer white good chances to develop a strong initiative based on black's disadvantages in central space and white's rapid development, and venturing the black side of Queen's gambit accepted was considered risky.
Apparently, Kasparov knows something I didn't when I was fifteen (duh).
Still, Kasparov's choice of opening certainly led to a difficult position requiring an accurate defense after white developed significant pressure on black's central pawn and on the queenside. However, the pressure rapidly dissipated following a set of exchanges that even gave black a short-lived counterattack on white's king position, leading to a position with even material and no real sources of play for either side, hence the draw.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened in a longer match played under a different winning criterion like 'best-of-ten' or 'first to achieve a given score.'
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