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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."

24 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. one move by civilengineer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The series ended in a draw essentialy because of one move. The move 5. ...a6 in game 3 by the computer is very interesting/controversial. A computer needs to be programmed to play to its strength, i.e open positions. This move reveals a fundamental flaw in the program. The computer chose this even though 6. c5 is among possible replies which forcibly closes the position. So, the programmers did not incorporate best algorithms to avoid closed positions. Instead of 5....a6 why did not the computer choose 5....Be7 which is more in line with convention and less likely to lead to a closed position? But, whatever might be the case, it was a good show by Kasparov. He showed that computer software has a long way to go more than computer hardware to beat humans.

    --

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    1. Re:one move by PK_ERTW · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I disagree. The series may have ended in a draw because of one move, but it certainly wasn't that one. The most significant move in the game 32...Rg7 in game 2 by Kasparov.

      Kasparov was trying to hold on for a draw in this game, while playing the disadvantaged black. He screwed one move and the computer pounced on him. Had he managed a draw in that game, he would have had an overall winning record for the series.

      pk

      --
      Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
    2. Re:one move by TrippTDF · · Score: 4, Interesting

      He showed that computer software has a long way to go more than computer hardware to beat humans.

      No, computers have a long way to go to beat the masters.

      I was an avid chess player in high school. I played on a national level a couple of times even.

      I've since stopped playing as much, but I do play from time to time. i keep a chess program on my palm pilot. Some dumb free thing I downloaded from the internet. Even when I'm concentrating on the game, I still get my ass kicked on the higher levels.

      Now, i am no champion by any account. I don't think my USCF rating when above 900 ever. However, I can still beat your average Joe that I sit down to play with. I doubt any average person would do so well against the palm pilot, either.

      So when people say that this is finally where computers take the advantage over humans, i have to disagree. Computers took the advantage over humans a long time ago. Now it's just icing on the cake.

    3. Re:one move by Theobon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I get my ass kicked by most chess players I go up against but I have still beaten every comp player I have gone up against. Sure these aren't great programs but GNUchess is pretty powerful and has beat many 1000 rack players that I have asked to play it. The key is that you can trick a comp very easly. YOu hid your self behind many move victories so that the tree doesn't see it before it is too late. Comps are good at repetitive testing of piles of options but it has no innovation and the inablity to see what is happening in the game. If you look at game 3 from this match Fritz didn't have a clue it was loosing until the end. All it knew was it evaluated the game to -1.5 which is meaningless when you can see it's impending doom easily.

  2. Someone explain this by Brad1138 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't understand how a computer that can compute millions of moves a sec. and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win? Even a home computer I would think could compute thousands of moves a sec. How could any person possibly out think that???

    --
    If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
    1. Re:Someone explain this by SomeGuyFromCA · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win?

      Not 20-50 moves deep, closer to 19 half moves. And even that doesn't guarantee victory.

      For a textbook case of how to beat a computer, look at game 3. Kasparov went to a closed position, kept material on the board, and slowly forced it back. Meanwhile, the computer could never see what hundreds or thousands saw - that its only chance was to push pawns on the king side. Unfortunately, even seeing 19 half-moves ahead, the computer couldn't bring this to a clear advantage and was stymied by the general principle of "don't move the pawns that are in front of your King."

      So the computer wasted time while Kasparov romped.

      --
      if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
  3. how will chess handle cyborgs? by nizo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was just wondering, how will the chess world handle cyborgs? Will people who have electronic "enhancements" be considered to be cheating? Heck, will they even have time to play chess, or will they be too busy taking over the world? What does everyone else think?

  4. Re:Deus Ex Machina? by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No joke, people were tampering with the machine during that match. IBM even altered its opening book after the game had already started. Some even accuse IBM of allowing on of the programming team--a GM--to enter moves during one game. Why would IBM cheat? Gee I dunno, but its stock price soared the day they announced that Deeper Blue won.

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  5. I love these stories by Fux+the+Penguin · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Negative Computer Bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I don't see why people present this argument, really.

    Human advancement in the field of chess has not levelled off while computer chess has been gaining on it: GM's are getting stronger all the time, just as computers and the hardware they run on are.

    The real question as I see it is - Can machines (non-quantum) ever overcome the wall they hit at 16-20 ply and apply actual positional knowledge?

  7. Kasparov runs on limited hardware, too by Pac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am not trying to dismiss the feat, no. Chess as a human standing place against the machines are over since Deep Blue. But give credit where credit is due, the feat here is Kasparov's, one of the few humans alive today still capable of beating the machines anytime, anywhere.

    It is an interesting coincidence that during the same few years computer chess entered adulthood the best chess player ever born was alive to hold the fort for a while longer. Probably not a coincidence, either.

  8. Re:Special. by Hatta · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Chess is easy, get your openings and closings from a table and it's not too hard to brute force the middle. I'll only be impressed when a computer player can beat a competant go player.

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  9. Re:day of the machines by GuyMannDude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I dunno, seems to me that if a machine can beat 99.9999(ad nauseum) percent of humanity, that day might be here already.

    It's also interesting to note that a computer who has defeated almost every human it encounters could, in a matter of seconds, communicate precisely how to do so to other computers. When a person beats a computer at something, they can tell their friends "kinda" what their logic was. But the speed of knowledge transmission and the accuracy of it would be far inferior to what a computer can do.

    All the machines would have to do is give each one a specific problem to solve. As soon as one computer solves its problem, it immediately communicates its results to all the other machines, provided there is connectivity between them. Now all those other machines know exactly how to solve the problem too.

    GMD

  10. Guess what.... by Eevee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    but is a car listed in Guinness under the fastest mile?

    Yes.

    The one-mile (1.609-km) land speed record is 1,227.985 km/h (763.055 mph), set by Andy Green in Thrust SSC in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA, on October 15, 1997. Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) completed its record-breaking run in a matter of seconds, but was the culmination of six years of work and a six-week on-site campaign. Two and a half years of research went into the shape of the Thrust SSC, and building the most powerful car ever took a further two years and 100,000 man-hours.

    Guinness World Records

  11. Re:Deus Ex Machina? by agurkan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That accusation is an outrageous lie! Ken Thompson was personally responsible for such a thing not happening and said that the moves had come from the machine not from human intervention. Also IBM did not alter opening book of DB after a game started. Which game is that?

    --
    ato
  12. Re:Negative Computer Bias by Migrant+Programmer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The world chess champion will ALWAYS be a human, not a machine.

    The world checkers champion is a machine Why not chess? Why not a forklift? There can be separate champions for "human" and "world".

  13. Re:Special. by CaptKilljoy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The question in my mind is: Kasparov won the last two games. Had there been more than four games in the series, would X3D Fritz have won any games other than the initial two or has Kasparov figured out a strategy to beat Fritz?

  14. Enhancements: the coming issues by GuyMannDude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was just wondering, how will the chess world handle cyborgs? Will people who have electronic "enhancements" be considered to be cheating? Heck, will they even have time to play chess, or will they be too busy taking over the world? What does everyone else think?

    Oh, man, you are opening a huge can of worms on this one. Here's just a few ideas to think of:

    • If you have cybernetic enhancements will you be required to disclose this information to your doctor? The government? Your employer?
    • Will cybernetic implants be affordable enough that anyone who wants one can get one? Or will this just serve to increase the chasm between the rich and poor?
    • Will enhancements replace race, sex, and sexual orientation as the prejudicial attribute of choice? Will employers prefer to hire people with the enhancements knowing that the employee can always be "upgraded" if the company forks over the cash? Or will employers be wary of hiring people with cybernetic implants because of their suspectability to computer virii?

    I could go on and on but, seriously, the questions that are going to come up when people start modifying themsevles either genetically or cybernetically are going to be much more serious than whether they are allowed to play in "Open" chess tournaments.

    GMD

  15. This sort of thing winds me up by Jiminez · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hate these sort of stories because people read so much crap into them. If you view it as it actually is then fair enough, but if you think this has anything to do with Artificial Intelligence or Machine-Thought you couldn't be further off. This is the extended life of a festering academic dead end that started 30 or so years ago and is wasting time and resources, that could be spent on real research into AI. This is SIMULATED INTELLIGENCE, a machine that does nothing but churn through a DB's and apply brute force search with a coupla crappy heuristics, in an attempt to simulate the appearance of what a human does truly intelligently. The definition of AI should be the research of systems that deal with INFINITE Problem spaces. This is the *miracle of real intelligence* - that we can be addressed with problems with infinite search spaces such as simply walking or crossing a road, and somehow, despite the infinite possibilities come out with a perfect solution. You ever seen a computer try and cope with exponential chaos of juggling? A human can learn in an hour. Chess is a big space but of course a number cruncher will eventually be able to solve it. The real intelligence is how the hell a human is capable of it at all given our limited resources. Build a synthetic machine that can play chess *as a human does*, THEN your on the money, and on the way to creating true AI.

  16. This is not Artificial Intelligence by z00z · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ... proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived. And it is still very far away IMHO.

    Chess playing programs take advantage of higher CPU speeds, smart tree-traversal routines and other heuristics to explore as many possiblities as they can in a given amount of time, before deciding what the next best move is. Now, I'm not dismissing this as wrong or useless. In fact such techniques are extremely useful in a variety of applications. Call them anything you like, but please don't call them "Intelligent". They are more of a brute force approach where each possible move is checked and the best one is chosen, (although I agree that they do give the impression of intelligent behaviour).

    To me, "intelligence" is the ability to adapt to new, unknown environments, and to come up with novel ideas that are outside of a given repertoire. Games of Complete Information like chess do not qualify as test beds for AI. Ask X3D Fritz to calculate the area of the unit circle, and you'll know what I mean. The only reason chess has become such a standard for judging AI is that early AI researchers at MIT made it a goal to write a chess-playing program that can beat humans (for an interesting history of those days, check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy).

    There is definitely lots of real research in AI going on. This is just not one of them.

  17. Not going to happen by cubicledrone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When a computer wins a poker tournament, then we can talk about the "day of the machines." Until then, it's nothing more than a series of mathematical calculations, not a test of chess strategies.

    --
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  18. Re:Special. by Misanthropic+Lycanth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Whoa whoa whoa... the implication that computers never choke is entirely too strong. I'll submit that a computer will probably never make the same kind of mistakes that a human does (unless we achieve perfect AI), but a computer is still made of materials governed by the laws of physics. There is always a non-vanishing probability that a bit can be flipped, or a series of bits that avoid error detection. Now, whether or not this is the same as a human "choking" in the heat of the moment is a discussion about semantics.

    --

    Physics: Making the universe open source.
  19. Re:Special. by ghjm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, perhaps a human could have beaten him in game three *IF* he played the same anti-computer chess against the human in question. Presumably he would know he was playing against a human, and not waste moves on anti-computer techniques like that pawn move on the king's side.

    It would be interesting to do a chess-based Turing Test. Have Kasparov play an exhibition with three simultaneous games, where he doesn't know which one is the computer. See if he can pick it out.

    -Graham

  20. Re:Proving again it is not the time of the machine by Mysticalfruit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It could be that in the future the best chess playing computer isn't programmed at all. Instead it's merely told what the rules of the game are and it's then left to figure out on it's own the best strategies to play. Sort of a genetic chess algorithm.

    There is a good example of this put into practice by a researcher who was experimenting with neural nets implemented in FPGA chips to create rectifying circuits. He'd setup a random set of interconnections and then through elimination have a program make changes to the chip until it got the desired results. Only keeping the changes that improved the design and discarding the others.

    When it was all said and done, the researcher got an rectifying circuit that uses alot less space and gates then it should, and he didn't clearly understand how it worked. Turns out his program had stumbled into a previously unknown characteristic of the interaction of gates in proximity.

    Now just imagine if this were done to create a chess computer.

    You could possibly get a chess computer that can beat anybody, but nobody would entirely understand how it works on the inside...

    --
    Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.