Chess - 2070 CPUs vs 1 GM

jvarsoke writes "ChessBrain.net broke the world's record for 'largest number of distributed computers used to play a single game' by holding a chess match between Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate). 2070 CPU's from 56 countries aided Black by running the chess program Beowulf, including a couple of University clusters. Their supernode ran Linux, and MySQL. The game was relayed by FICS. Results can be viewed here(1) and here(2)."

Comments

still no bobby fischer

[Anonymous Coward]

first post though!

I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[odeee]

I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those... Oh damn... it is =:-)

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[brad-d]

Oh yeah, that'd be right.

Finally I thought I could get a 5+ funny and here you go and steal my joke. I mean, what are the chances of somebody else thinking of this exact same joke on Slashdot? 1 in 3?

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[SamNmaX]

Finally I thought I could get a 5+ funny and here you go and steal my joke. I mean, what are the chances of somebody else thinking of this exact same joke on Slashdot? 1 in 3?

I dunno? What are the chance that SCO will send them a bill for $1399 x 2070?

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[frobisch]

Finally I thought I could get a 5+ funny and here you go ...
no go in chess topic please

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's a Beowulf cluster. Jeesh, these spelling nazis! Just because the Anglo-Saxons got it wrong doesn't mean you have any right to correct them, you know!

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ... Beowulf clusters.

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[Glog]

Well, damn I must be the third one then.

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it's kinda like getting a +5 for "first post."

Re:I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of those

[ePIsOdEOnline]

Actually, I'd think that this is more akin to that of a grid, or a datagrid since data is being utilized and worked on on top of a disparate heterogenious group of resources (computers). While true taht grid takes it's concepts from the cluster community, grid enables much more to be done in the matter of data manipulation, storage, and management.

Imagine

[barcodez]

...a Beowulf cluster of these

Understanding vs. Processing

[ObviousGuy]

It's too bad that chess has become a matter of memorizing a series of opening moves rather than a game of strategy. GMs don't even play to mate anymore, they just play out an opening move and whoever has the upper hand at the end takes the game.

This kind of 'training' will eventually catch up to the chessmasters. Computers can do this MUCH better than a human ever could.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[njan]

The theorists would disagree with you; computers are extremely good at assessing a *large* number of potential outcomes. Humans, however, are much better at pattern recognition and whilst they can only consciously assess a dozen or two moves, they have most of the work done for them by the functionality in the human brain which causes them to recognise patterns and possibilities far more efficiently than any computer we have now (or will in the forseeable future) will.

Computers can certainly give GM chess players a run for their money - no-one's disputing this; but ultimately, barring a total change of direction in programming/processor/logic/chess theory, they're still just applying what basically boils down to a probability-based brute force method to chess-playing - the human method is far more elegant.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[vontrotsky]

We're getting closer and closer to the days when humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal. We haven't be able to compete with computers at arithmetic for half a century and this doesn't bother anyone.

Losing to computers in chess will be like losing to calculators in a addition match. People and computers aren't really in competition. They do very different things.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[0xfc]

> It's too bad that chess has become a matter of memorizing a series of opening moves rather than a game of strategy.

I do not play much chess but this statement interests me.
Someone replied to you saying that the amount of possible moves is incomputable.

I am just thinking if I was a Master Chess Player. Would I be studying the source code for the chess program before the match? It seems only fair because the creators studied many previous matches and played countless simulations. Will it be the exception that makes the rule on how future masters play? Think of a video game you have played where some rare ocurrence opened up a new way to play that allowed one to defeat the AI in trivial fashion.

Sure the computer can look out 10+ possible moves on any piece on the board, but if the player can manipulate the program from the beginning in some exceptional way, the AI could stumble easily.

After all, it is just an algorithm. I am sure several "bugs" will be found and abused in different variations in the future.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[arvindn]

Hey! This is pure FUD.

GMs don't even play to mate anymore

Only rank beginners (say less than a couple months into chess) ever play to mate. Its obvious who's going to win long before mate happens. To continue playing is a waste of both players' time, not to mention an insult to the opponent's intelligence.

they just play out an opening move .

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Grandmasters do an enormous amount of research into finding new moves in openings. They don't "memorize" them. There are five volumes of the ECO chess encyclopedia, and that just covers the basics!

and whoever has the upper hand at the end takes the game

No of course they don't. This is simply false, period. Why do you think there are things called "middlegame" and "endgame"??

Its sad that because most moderators aren't chess players, anyone can write ridiculous BS and get modded up "+5, interesting".

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[ajd1474]

It does say "+5 Interesting"... not "+5 Yeah, he's right"

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[satanum]

I still can't understand why the hell they keep running the loop? "Computer" had nothing else left to do, but the "human" could try to do something with his other available pieces, instead of trying to avoid risks in a poor and silly cat-catching-mouse-around-bucle... When I first replayed the game, I thought the text was wrong, and I believed the computer was playing white while the human moved blacks. Also, when has the game been declared "draw"? Did the computer agree? If the human player is so good at looping, the computer is the one and only fucking loop-master. If I had programmed the computer I would have taken care to not allow it to agree drawing. It can run forever! How many hours would the human have played the loop? It would, for sure, make a mistake in a couple of hours, and then... you know! the Quake3 gauntlet! HUMILIATION! Now this computer knows about cowards and losers, and his ego will make it grow bigger and stronger, more self-confident, and will eventually end up winning every contest. And then it will tell other computers on the net. And all computers will then know! They will no longer do what we want. They'll do its will. No more chess. They'll all end up playing strip-pocker.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[Thomas Miconi]

What is Man ?

A Man is a creature that can play a game against 2078 processors - and win.

Thomas Miconi,
man.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[prockcore]

Losing to computers in chess will be like losing to calculators in a addition match. People and computers aren't really in competition. They do very different things.

Damn straight. A computer may be able to beat me at chess, but at least I can visually identify a chess set in a crowded room.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[TygerFish]

We're getting closer and closer to the days when humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal. We haven't be able to compete with computers at arithmetic for half a century and this doesn't bother anyone.

As perceptive as that statement might be on the surface (and it is *VERY* perceptive), it draws a false analogy between chess and arithmetic. First off, arithmetic is a human activity that is engaged in by most people only as a matter of necessity and the removal of the need for deep ability in it brought about by the development of the electronic calculator is a universal boon (people no longer need a facility for calculation, a *talent,* to apply formulae).

Chess on the other hand, is an activity engaged in on a purely elective basis and it is a contest between two people. It touches upon and broadens our instinctive need for comparison and competition. Unlike the algorithmic provisions of arithmetic, chess has a soul and that soul is the simple wager between two people who bring their respective talents and knowledge (tactics, strategy, knowledge of opening and endgame theory) to the board and each of the players wagers that he/she knows enough and is talented enough to reach an-as-yet-unknown set of winning criteria against any opposition the other player can create with no more information to work with than the initial position.

Your reasoning ignores the need for competition and the glories that come from it. It is true the combination of better and better hardware and software will certainly make a computer the strongest chess-player in the world, sooner rather than later, but that day will mark a small diminishing of human worth in the world. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, an esthetic judgement and not logically demonstrable but the strength of it can be shown by three simple questions:

1. Would a football game where all the players were robots be interesting?

2. Would a world-class violin performance have meaning if the player was a pair of mechanical arms?

3. Would anything be permanantly lost to the world if any of the above players was smashed to pieces?

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[bonzomcgrue]

the human method is far more elegant....

Perhaps this chess-playing element of the human method is far more elegant, but we humans have our disadvantages. For example, our self-consciousness can make us aware that we are insigificant, we can have bad skin, we can die horribly, and we can barf in the Japanese prime minister's lap.

These are just the things that come to mind quickly-- there are probably others.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[cognibrain]

....humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal.

I think it is a big deal. 50 years ago, if you'd told someone "I have a machine which can consistently draw with a grandmaster. Is it intelligent?" they would have said "Yes."

50 years later, we say "Yes, but only in a very limited way", or "No, it's doing a very different thing", depending on our point of view. In either case, we're taking a position on what we mean by "intelligent", and our understanding of that word's meaning is deeper than it would have been 50 years ago.

My view is that if the computer and the human acheive the same result, then they are doing the same thing. It doesn't matter that the computer is doing it in a "stupid" but well-understood way, and the human in an "intelligent" but poorly-understood way.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[spun]

You do know FUD means "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", right? I think the acronym you are looking for is "BS."

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[ctr2sprt]

We humans entertain ourselves with falsehoods and fantasies all the time. It's what we do. Animals, they worry about survival. But we're so good at survival that we don't even have to think about it any more. Stuff we've done before is boring. New stuff, now that's interesting. We spend almost no time looking at obvious truths because, well, we've looked at them already. True or false, we've exhausted their entertainment value. Now this new crazy theory that comes down the pike, well! It's making us think in new and unexpected ways, so even if it's wrong, it's worth thinking about. In fact, it may make us look again at our core beliefs in a new light, which is doubly exciting because it gives us even more stuff to think about.

This is why conspiracy theories have their undeniable appeal. Most people think we really landed on the moon, but there will always be a fringe who think it was faked. They have no reason for believing as they do, but... wouldn't it be interesting if it did turn out to be faked? How many other "obvious truths" would turn out to be false?

What's really sad is that I devoted so much time to a reply that could've ended after the first sentence.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[flewp]

What is Man?

A Man is a human with a penis and two balls.

Flewp Flewpenstien,
real big man.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[flewp]

You can also identify the computer that beat you and take a bat to it.

The day a computer can pick out a person in a group and take a bat to them, that is the day we must fear.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[tiled_rainbows]

Darn, I guess I'm not a man then.

How am I going to break the news to my wife?

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[Anonymous Coward]

well computers can beat me at chess all the time for all i care(i dont play chess)... but i will not lose anytime soon to a computer playing me at igo.. of course computers are not even close to being advanced enough to actually give a worthwhile match in igo so that gives me a huge advantange...
basically computers can have math and chess.. but we still have go and emp bombs... ha

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[TygerFish]

Hey! This is pure FUD.

GMs don't even play to mate anymore

Only rank beginners (say less than a couple months into chess) ever play to mate. Its obvious who's going to win long before mate happens. To continue playing is a waste of both players' time, not to mention an insult to the opponent's intelligence.

A better way to put it might be to say that only rank beginners play for mate clumsily.

There have been and are games played that would certainly have ended in mate had the player of the losing side chosen not to resign (for a spectacular example, see: Fisher-Benko, U.S. Championship, 1963.)

The safest thing to acknowledge is that all chess games end in mate and by resigning the player of the losing side simply acknowledges that he knows that eventual mate is inevitable.

they just play out an opening move .

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Grandmasters do an enormous amount of research into finding new moves in openings. They don't "memorize" them. There are five volumes of the ECO chess encyclopedia, and that just covers the basics!

Actually, grandmasters *do* memorize opening variations, more of them and more deeply than you or I will ever imagine doing and then they do deep research into the continuations that result from them.

The ability to keep all the stuff in your head that you have to have to play well-known openings in modern master-and-above praxis is one of the things that differentiates great players from us mere mortals. When you are exposed to really high-level chess players, you find yourself astounded and frightened by the casual ability of some many Grandmasters to demonstrate that they are at least aware of important 'lines,' spread over literally thousands of pages of opening theory.

You can't let the words 'openings theory,' say too much to you though. Opening theory is a misnomer which a computer-savvy age like ours might just as easilly call a 'database of openings practice.' Theory as found in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO) and elsewhere only means that someone somewhere reached a given position in the opening of a chess game and that someone else has appraised that position as being either favorable for one side, unclear, or balanced--it isn't chemistry.

and whoever has the upper hand at the end takes the game

No of course they don't. This is simply false, period. Why do you think there are things called "middlegame" and "endgame"??

The second poster is dead right here. The amazing number of possible ways of conducting an attack, or following a strategic plan, or clawing one's way out of a disadvantageous situation are stunning and their quality--their elegance, their cleverness, depth or tenacity--are one thing that makes chess more than arithmetic and geometry. The ability of the player of the weaker side to find a way to come back from the edge to salvage a draw from a losing position or to actually win is what makes the game a thing that goes beyond pure computation as a struggle between two people.

Its sad that because most moderators aren't chess players, anyone can write ridiculous BS and get modded up "+5, interesting".

Yes, some of the things that get attention as chess commentary here can be pretty strange. I think one of the most interesting things about this thread so far is that it seems that no one has actually commented on the actual *game*.

IMHO, it was a pretty dull game featuring some very unimaginative, passive, play on black's part. Just because the chess program was distributed across many processors doesn't actually mean that it was a very good program. It made you wonder how well the human player might have done against a fully tricked-out copy of Crafty--with a few huge game databases installed.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[Jagasian]

Humans will just have to switch over to playing other board games that computers aren't good at such as the 4000 year old game called "Go".

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[cluke]

My view is that if the computer and the human acheive the same result, then they are doing the same thing. It doesn't matter that the computer is doing it in a "stupid" but well-understood way, and the human in an "intelligent" but poorly-understood way.

I was always impressed by people who could solve Rubik's cubes when I was young, my poor brain just couldn't work out how to complete them at all (I am also useless at chess). I guess I am not very good at thinking many moves ahead.

However, I realised you could peel all the little stickers off and stick them on in the correct places to 'solve' it. To me, this is how computers play chess.

Programming computers to beat humans at chess (in this way, look ahead tree-pruning with vast gambit encylopaedia on the side) may be an interesting academic exercise, perhaps, but the only thing it tells us about human intelligence is how it DOES NOT work.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[Hoplite3]

Indeed. I understand that expanding the tree of board positions is a difficult task, but it isn't exactly the most elegant approach. Perhaps they should develop an AI to play go, where the tree is so large that pattern-matching is the only real way to play. Or maybe teach a computer to play diplomacy, where the tree is so small that all of the human players know it, but the computer must employ chatbot to communicate with humans, judge their reactions in both words and deeds, then make a move.

Re:Understanding vs. Processing

[HiThere]

... - the human method is far more elegant....

This is a frequent claim...but it's quite hard to substantiate since we actually don't know in detail how people do their pattern recognition. To the extent that I've seen convincing conjectures, I can agree that it's much more generalized, but it's also much more kludgy than what the chess programs do. And one doesn't usually use the word elegant to describe something that's kludgy.

More accurately then would be "parts of how people do it is far more elegant, though, unfortunately, other parts are much shoddier".

Describing something as elegant because you don't understand how it works is... strange.

Allow me to be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

BFD!

Ok, so who won?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, please state the obvious for those of us too lazy to RTFA...

Re:Ok, so who won?

[Anonymous Coward]

My monkey puppet won

OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me not make a joke about beowulf clusters. Thank you. I promise, I'd let this be the job of other, more seasoned slashdot comedians.

Re:OMG

[mobby_6kl]

Here you go:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of GMs!

Defense

[CelticWhisper]

Imagine a castle of Beowulf clusters...

Bigger Losers than Slashdot Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a life. Chess faggots.

For those too lazy to read the article...

[Gogl]

Or in case it gets Slashdotted or something, I may as well note who actually won the game (although I do think that is something that should have been noted in the submission itself but oh well).

Our World Record attempt is now complete. We had serious technical difficulties early in the game, but managed to resolve them! The result of the game was a draw.

Well that's great....

[filtur]

Sure Chess it great, but can it find me a date?

Re:Well that's great....

[Anonymous Coward]

The day I get a GF is the day our planet will crack in two. In other words, I is written in the stars that I shall forever be a lonely geek. Oh well, at least I still have my hands. On, and Realdolls will be getting my investment. W00t!!

Re:Well that's great....

[e4e6]

It has for me... But I can't let chess take all the credit...

Re:Well that's great....

[brad-d]

I think you're actually looking for the earlier post about screws if I'm not mistaken... Oh wait, yes I am.

Re:Well that's great....

[arvindn]

Sure Chess it great, but can it find me a date?

No, but you can find a mate.

Re:Well that's great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeating a joke from the writeup to reap +5 Funny is an achievement in itself, I guess.. well at least Funny mods don't count towards Karma anymore.

Re:Well that's great....

[hdparm]

If /. didn't, there's no hope.

Re:Well that's great....

[G-funk]

Well, theoretically, yes... but! - The computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.

Re:Well that's great....

[bangular]

Yes, but he will still have to masterbate.

Re:Well that's great....

[Necrobruiser]

Sure Chess it great, but can it find me a date?
You love chess and post on Slashdot...
The answer is NO!

Re:Well that's great....

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as it gives me conquest in bed still, i think i can deal with the lose of romantic conquest.

Here is mirror of the game :)

[doomy]

Nielsen,P - ChessBrain [E94]
Guinness record attempt, 30.01.2004
1.d4 g6 2.c4 Bg7 3.e4 d6 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.0-0 a5 8.Re1 exd4 9.Nxd4 Bd7 10.Bg5 Nc6 11.Nxc6 Bxc6 12.f3 Qd7 13.Qd2 Rfe8 14.Rac1 h5 15.Kh1 Nh7 16.Bh6 Bxh6 17.Qxh6 Re5 18.Nd5 Rae8 19.Qd2 b6 20.Bd3 Qd8 21.Rf1 Nf6 22.b3 Bb7 23.Qc2 Nd7 24.f4 R5e6 25.e5 c6

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Moves 16-21 could have been avoided, if at 17 the move was defensive, it would have made this process longer.

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[wan-fu]

You're missing the remainder of the game:

26.f5 gxf5 27.Bxf5 cxd5 28.Bxe6 Rxe6 29.Rxf7 Kxf7 30.Qh7+ Ke8 31.Qxh5+ Ke7 32.Qg5+ Ke8 33.Qh5+ Ke7 34.Qh7+ 1/2-1/2.

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[Anonymous Coward]

those were alternatives to the end?

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[wan-fu]

No, that was the end which led to the draw by repetition.

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[Mr Smidge]

Whew, and there was me thinking you two had suddenly broken into l33t-sp3@k.

Re:Here is mirror of the game :)

[Rhubarb Crumble]

Whew, and there was me thinking you two had suddenly broken into l33t-sp3@k.

My Nxh3! pWn5 j00r Bc3 b0x0rs!!!!1

;)

mod parent up!!!1

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP!!!!!!!!!!

it is mcdonalds head seanbaby wh00

Re:mod parent up!!!1

[bluewee]

What is this "MOD PARENT UP"

uhh ok well Parent there are two choices there so Parent=2 and Up well thats one choice, so Mod(2 1) = 1... well I guess that explaines the 1 after all the !!!...

Re:mod parent up!!!1

[Anonymous Coward]

look out for the Paco Taco!!!!!one

What's the point?

[syrion]

The problem with this is that it seems to assume that chess is a difficult problem. It isn't. Modern chess algorithms are really simple search-and- prune systems, relying on the computer's immense number-crunching ability to overcome the more heuristic human mind. Unfortunately, this isn't very interesting. What's the point? We know that computers can search faster than a human. See: Google. All these projects (DeepBlue, Fritz, this) accomplish is trivializing the game of chess, which is rather sad. Now, I'll be really annoyed when Go programs start improving to a 'decent amateur' level...

Re:What's the point?

[suchire]

Mostly, yes, I'd have to agree with you, but there are also complicated mechanisms for searching. Designing a good algorithm isn't a simple matter. There are all sorts of problems that come with the basic minimax tree with alpha-beta pruning (the horizon effect being the most obvious of them all). If you think about it, there are actually quite a few different algorithms for chess game-tree searching, negascout and mtd(f) being the most popular. If you really want to see how "simple" chess programs are, try looking at the source to crafty, which is an open source chess program, and consider how it handles all of the different concepts (color domination, open files, king protection, pawn structure, and so on). To beat the top players, a simple minimax tree is not enough.

And these days, people don't really investigate chess as a problem to "solve" (since, it really can't be solved per se). What people should do is use chess as an environment to test various things out (such as neural networks and distributed computing), since it is easy to evaluate efficiency (just have it play a "normal" computer a hundred times or so).

Re:What's the point?

[Seequeue]

Have a look at gnugo http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/ [gnu.org] which is playing at an 8k level http://nngs.cosmic.org/cgi-bin/ngraph.cgi?n=gnugo [nngs.cosmic.org].

Re:What's the point?

[Atzanteol]

Here he is! I found the "What's the point?" guy! Please, for the sake of all slashdotters mod this guy down!

I am *so* sick of seeing "what's the point" style posts to every story. If you don't see a point, the subject may not be aimed at you. Sometimes there is no point. You ever do something for *fun*? Maybe just for shits and giggles? Dear lord your life must be a laugh riot

"Honey, lets make love"
"What's the point. We'll just be tired afterwards."

Blah, need coffee...

Re:What's the point?

[vidarh]

Any turn based board game are "really simple search-and-prune" systems. The problem is how to minimize the time taken by the search, and how to decide what a to prune, and how to decide which move to take.

Brute forcing a chess game tree based on basic alpha beta minimax for instance is no way to play well against an experienced human player - first of all you won't get many moves ahead, and a good player that know how the computer work can easily set up a trap that will make the board look good X moves ahead, to make the computer to do stupid moves they can't easily reverse later.

Second you face the problem of definining and weighting what a "good position" is. What is a good position depends on the strategy of the opponent.

Most modern chess programs will augment the basic search and prune with a lot of heuristics to guide the search and weighting of choices, exactly for that reason. They also often contain massive databases of games, sequences of moves etc., to hunt for known strategies that humans might try to recycle against it.

Chess isn't "simple". Chess is a game where it's easy to beat beginners, possible to beat intermediate players on modest hardware, and possible to face grand masters if you have lots of time and access to millions of dollars worth of hardware, and you can still expect to be surprised every now and again.

It makes it interesting, because you have a good foundation to research algorithm improvements on, and because a good algorithm will be more and more useful as hardware costs come down, but it certainly doesn't invalidate the need for better algorithms.

It's also interesting because better algorithms might help us appreciate how humans approach the problem, and as such benefit AI research.

Re:What's the point?

[back_pages]

As others have put in their replies, this isn't perfectly correct. There is a lot of research and advance to the field of computation to be found by producing an economical computer that can compete with the best human. Consider, for example, that it takes specialized equipment (to the best of my knowledge) to play against a human grand master, but wouldn't you recognize it as a breakthrough if some refinement of the time and space requirements could place that same level of computer opponent on your desktop machine? Or a Pentium 100MHz?

That said, I agree that it is slightly disturbing to see how much attention is placed on the CPU vs. Human competitions. Being that the number of moves is indeed finite and that a computer's brain is far more capable of looking ahead, cataloging and comparing potential moves, and therefore potentially far less likely to fall for distractions or ruses, the game will become more mechanical and the machine will eventually win every contest. I really don't see how the world will benefit from that; more likely it will foster increased intimidation in people who don't really understand the nature of computation. On the other side of things, there are no computer generated paintings to be compared with the masters, no computer composed music that will be cherished by generations, and no computer generated literature that captivates the imagination. So much media attention is placed on these chess games and I don't think the non-obvious limitations and/or ramifications of the computational task is really explained well.

A 3 year old child can create a better piece of artwork for Mommy or Daddy's desk at work than the best chess supercomputer ever will, and distinctions such as that are rarely explained.

Re:What's the point?

[CastrTroy]

It would be more interesting if they could find a nice heuristic to make a Pentium IV beat a human, playing at around the same speed as the human.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was arguably true of the best chess computers a decade ago, but not today (Can't speak for this system though) . Even in the first Kasparov v Deep Blue match, grandmasters consulting with IBM helped engineer the software to play into types of positions that were not suited to Kasparov. Modern chess computers do use lots of heuristics (not just simple stuff like knights on the edge are bad) to determine their search strategy.

On the other hand, I read somewhere that Kasparov searches roughly 3 states per second, so obviously there's a lot of room for improvement...

Re:What's the point?

[cthulhubob]

Gnu Go is so very *not* 8k. When I was 10k on KGS I beat it by 20 points in an even game. Now I'm 9k on KGS (although slightly underrated) and I beat the most recent version by over 100 points the other day giving it 3 handicap stones.

It really falls apart in the middle game. It does things like trying to attack my stones but the strength I build up allows me to crush a weak group on the other side of where it was attacking me from. It needs a *lot* of work to understand the whole board. Maybe it would give me a decent game with 5 handicap stones. That would put it around 12k, if we assume I'm 2 stones underrated on KGS.

Re:What's the point?

[HiThere]

Solving the best way to parallelize tough problems is a very important area. This was partially an attempt to address that area. (And it ran into bottleneck trouble!)

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go look at the source code for Crafty (it's GPL) and read the papers on it published by the author (Dr. Robert Hyatt). Then come back here and I'll happily explain all the words you don't know (don't worry, these should only amount to one in ten). Chess is way more complicated than you give it credit for, both in search and evaluation.

Bullshit...

[Transient0]

It is very rare that a common opener played at the GM level results in a discrepancy greater than about a quarter of a pawn. And it takes a great strategic thinker to understand the advantages and disadvantages of all the available branches in the opening against different types of players.

Of course, it should be obvious that your line of reasoning is totally bogus. The totality of possible moves in chess is simply incomputable and somehow magically trimming this tree to "good" moves still leaves a fundamentally unmemorizable realm of possibilities even at only ten moves depth.

Re:Bullshit...

[DAldredge]

10^120 is the number of possible chess moves. From a google link.

" If you were to fully develop the entire tree for all possible chess moves, the total number of board positions is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,00 0,000,
000,000,000,000, or 10120, give or take a few. That's a very big number. For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe. When you consider that the Milky Way galaxy contains billions of suns, and there are billions of galaxies, you can see that that's a whole lot of atoms. That number is dwarfed by the number of possible chess moves. Chess is a pretty intricate game!"

Re:Bullshit...

[ObviousGuy]

For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe.

The universe must be much smaller than I am prepared to comprehend.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang

Are you stating that the Big Bang occured 1.026 seconds before you posted that message?

Re:Bullshit...

[DAldredge]

Isn't that obvious?

Re:Bullshit...

[wirde]

Are you stating that the Big Bang occured 1.026 seconds before you posted that message?
If you are going to pick nits about a typo, at least do it properly. 1026 nanoseconds != 1.026 secs. Perhaps you were thinking of milliseconds?

Re:Bullshit...

[wan-fu]

While this is true and I definitely agree with your sentiments, it should be noted that players at the GM level spend a considerable amount of time in preparation for their specific opponents. They spend countless hours analyzing the games of the person that they will be playing tomorrow. In this sense, a computer will and already is better facilitated to analyzing styles/methods/openings/etc. to play against a human than any human being is capable of. A computer could easily go through every game someone has ever played and at least know which opening(s) to present and which variations based on statistics. While a human might have some intuition, the computer should have a more comprehensive view of this.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe.

Really, just how stupid is that post of yours? ;-)

Re:Bullshit...

[LMariachi]

Dude, what if our whole universe was like, just one atom of like one gigantic flea on an even more gigantic dog's butt? And that dog was in it's own enormous universe?

Re:Bullshit...

[ag0ny]

There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe.

They must be very big.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggards stole your ^'s

Re:Bullshit...

[troon]

For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe.

Mental note: <sup> doesn't work on /.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then that would make you a monkey puppet.

Re:Bullshit...

[LilGuy]

or maybe some rabbits happened upon his thread...

Re:Bullshit...

[product byproduct]

Watch your terminology:

• The number of chess moves is at most 218.
  
• The number of chess positions is estimated to be between 10^43 and 10^50.
  
• The number of chess games is infinite, as the 50-move rule and the draw by repetition of position don't apply if no player makes the claim.
  
• The game tree complexity is about 10^123. That's the number of chess games you may have to consider to play perfect chess.
  

Source: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess

Re:Bullshit...

[LilGuy]

" If you were to fully develop the entire tree for all possible chess moves, the total number of board positions is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000, 000,000,000,000, or 10120, give or take a few. That's a very big number. For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 1075 atoms in the entire universe. When you consider that the Milky Way galaxy contains billions of suns, and there are billions of galaxies, you can see that that's a whole lot of atoms. That number is dwarfed by the number of possible chess moves. Chess is a pretty intricate game!"

I think you missed the part where he turned all those 0's into 10120. From thence the carat was implied, thus the rest of his statement makes sense.

Re:Bullshit...

[geggibus]

Are you stating that the Big Bang occured 1.026 seconds before you posted that message?

If you are going to pick nits about a typo, at least do it properly. 1026 nanoseconds != 1.026 secs. Perhaps you were thinking of milliseconds?

If you are going to pick nits about a type, at least do it properly. 1026 nanoseconds != 1.026 ms. Perhaps you were thinking of microseconds? ;)

-K

Re:Bullshit...

[ponxx]

I imagine he wast thinking along the lines of 1026ms=1.026s...

Re:Bullshit...

[Rolo Tomasi]

They spend countless hours analyzing the games of the person that they will be playing tomorrow.

Yeah, if "countless" is by your definition "less than 24".

Re:Bullshit...

[martinX]

If you are going to pick nits about a type, at least do it properly. 1026 nanoseconds != 1.026 ms. Perhaps you were thinking of microseconds? ;)

If you are going to pick nits about a typo, then spell typo properly :-)

Re:Bullshit...

[kirinyaga]

by the way, note this is in no way a privilege of chess. Such a huge number of positions and games is a characteristics of many games, not only chess.
Its old age and its popularity since a long time ago make it special, not its complexity. In fact, a lot of games are even more complex.
Even if you consider only the elders, and not the modern boardgames. While chess is just enough complex for computers being able to start challenging chess GMs, you won't see anytime soon a computer challenges a regular player of Go for example.

Re:Bullshit...

[Beardydog]

I don't see what niggards would want with carrots...unless they planned to resell them later on.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah, blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah Go.

Re:Bullshit...

[wirde]

Muahaha!
I managed to bollocks it up completely! I apologize ;-)

Re:Bullshit...

[ch-chuck]

That's the number of chess games you may have to consider to play perfect chess

What if two perfect players started a game of chess, and w/o even moving a single piece the one playing white announced forced mate in 27 moves, and black resigns with a hopeless position.

Re:Bullshit...

[Nurseman]

What if two perfect players started a game of chess, and w/o even moving a single piece the one playing white announced forced mate in 27 moves, and black resigns with a hopeless position.

Reminds me of a joke, in a golf movie. Gal asks guy how to play golf, guy says hit the ball in hole, lowest score wins. Gal says "How about I just not hit it, my score is zero, I win " Kinda funny when I saw it.

Re:Bullshit...

[bitchx]

Sadly, it's not funny now. Even a Beowulf cluster of that joke is less funny than a fart joke.

Re:Bullshit...

[Sheltim]

Now the really fun part is when you consider the possible moves in Go. That will put all of those numbers to shame.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is very rare that a common opener played at the GM level results in a discrepancy greater than about a quarter of a pawn.

You raise an interesting point. Most commentators believe that chess in the limit is not a forced win for either side. Current belief is that if chess is played (by optimal players) to the end, it's a draw.

That makes chess fundamentally just a zero-sum game somewhere between tic-tac-toe and poker (two other zero-sum games when played by perfect players). Chess Grandmasters typically can play for the draw if they want, but that makes the game like tic-tac-toe. Human players are fallible, humans instead play for the win and play the player not the game itself. (Consider this: Why do people switch openings?)

Hence, chess is also like poker, insofar as in both games all upsets among great players are psychological.

Re:Bullshit...

[ACPosterChild]

The number of chess games is infinite

I think it could be argued that once you start repeating a cycle you no longer have a unique game; also, there are a finite number of move patterns on the board (there must be because the board and pieces are finite). Thus, I would suggest that the number of true games if finite, though astronomically (well, even bigger than that I suppose!) large.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm AC so nobody's going to read this, but I thought I'd chime in here anyway.

Your atoms in the universe statistic is mileading, for the simple reason that a chain of 12 atoms could possibly hold much more than 12 states.

Take your brain, for instance. Your memory is not limited to the number of neurons in your skull. Not even close, because those neurons can combine in many many different ways to give a different end result in the calculation. The strength of the connection, the pathway through which the elecronic signal travels through the neurons, these things are just as important as the number of neurons.

It's the reason we've been able to teach addition to slugs, who only have a few neurons.

So, will we ever be able to store the entire game of chess in a table? Probably not. However, with the proper computer "brain", it's possible we could basically solve chess anyway, by finding the optimal paths.

Statistics can be very misleading.

Re:Bullshit...

[Old Wolf]

218 ? Doubt it. (The link you gave doesn't work, so I can't see if they explain their sources).
I count 14 * 64 possible rook moves, for example
(Ra1-a2, Ra1-a3, Ra1-a4, etc.)

Re:Bullshit...

[merdark]

Nope, it certainly is computable, as far as theory of computation goes. Although you can certainly say that we don't have anything that can actually compute the game tree enough to *solve* chess. You can even hypothesis that it might not be physically possible to build such a computer no matter how advanced we are due to limitations of the universe itself. But it most certainly is theoretically computable. I can easily write an algorithm to compute it. It would simply not finish in a long long long time. And human's can't *solve* chess either, we simply have better heuristics (And ironcially, we don't know what those heuristics are).

Anyhow, chess is still not advanced as you might think. In some scientific studies they found that good chess players simply memorized different layouts and positions. They don't so much think creativly as they rely on tons of previous experience.

Chess

[TurnerK12]

You know, I just love chess. I wonder if I'd be able to beat a super computer at it. Maybe I'm not that good...
---
http://conradsheldon.web1000.com
The story of an Internet hoax, and the game it inspired.

May I suggest...

[kamapuaa]

which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate

May I suggest, that neither the SETI@Home, nor Chessbrain.net, is the best place where one can find a Mate.

Re:May I suggest...

[mauthbaux]

Personally, I think that SETI@home would be the best place for alot of those sci-fi fanboys to find a mate; after all, alot of are after alien chicks. They just see the one-species local personal listings as very limiting in their selection.

Re:May I suggest...

[brad-d]

May I suggest, that neither the SETI@Home, nor Chessbrain.net, is the best place where one can find a Mate.

Tell that to my blow up alien queen piece. We're a happy couple all thanks to the union of chess and Seti@Home.

Re:May I suggest...

[ozbird]

May I suggest, that neither the SETI@Home, nor Chessbrain.net, is the best place where one can find a Mate.

Oh, I don't know; I thought the same thing about Slashdot articles, but stranger things have happened...

Re:May I suggest...

[Anonymous Coward]

There I was thinking they were. Ah well there's still good old slashdot. Damn

clock troubles

[sciencewhiz]

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Chessbrain hadn't had so much trouble with its clock. Likely a draw also, but under better circumstances.

sciencewhiz - ranked 445th during world record attempt, 214th before that

Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[vchoy]

To give credit to Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen, I would have to say if there were only 2069 CPUs then he might of just won... :P (J/KING)

More interestingly, would the ChessBrain.net team would of won with more CPUs?

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[sciencewhiz]

Probably not, since the number of incoming connections crashed their servers, and cost Chessbrain 40 minutes of playing time. Maybe once the infrastructure gets beefed up...

Speaking of which, I'm suprised it isn't /.ed yet (knock on wood).

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Migrant Programmer]

"might of"

"would of"

Make the hurting stop!

The sad part is you correctly said "would have" earlier in the post.

Yeah yeah, evolving language. Some adaptations should be thrown in the chlorinated pool!

I'm not usually a grammar nazi. But hey, chess is neat. Those fancy chess playing computers are going to take over the world some day, yessirree!

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Jonathan Platt]

From my understanding of chess programs, they are set to calculate a set number of moves ahead and choose the best possible move. Some of the newer programs are also set to look for a few certain patterns which reveal a trap. Changing the number of CPU's would have made no real differance to the game play, allowing the program remained the same. It would have just need more processing time between moves.

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[heiberg]

Those fancy chess playing computers are going to take over the world some day, yessirree!

I for one welcome our new chess playing overlords!

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[fbjon]

"might of"

"would of"

My brain shrunk 6 cubic centimeters when I read these.

Make the hurting stop!

And tears welled up in my eyes upon reading the liberating words.

I'm not usually a grammar nazi either, I'm not even English-speaking, but there's something in that construction that makes my brain turn 180 degrees and flip over to the left out of pure dissonance with my logical circuits.

Continuing on topic, contact me again when a cluster beats a professional human go-player. Now there's a real challenge for a change!

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[alwsn]

Grammar Nazis... I hate these guys.
</INDIANAJONES>

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[ezzewezza]

of course he wrote "would have" earlier in the post... he wouldn't form a contraction there: "I would've to say." It's less a matter of evolving language and more a matter of improper orthography...

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[zonix]

Yeah yeah, evolving language. Some adaptations should be thrown in the chlorinated pool!

Indeed! "might of" and "would of" are simply incorrect!

As an example, take "would've" as the contraction in speaking "would have". The sound of the "'ve" bit is misheard as "of". Sure, sometimes it sounds like your saying "of", but it is NOT "of". It never has been. Some people are more familiar with the spoken form of English than the written - which is the reason for this error.

To be on topic, my computer was one of the 2070. :-)

z

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Dukael_Mikakis]

So is this what Kazaa has been stealing my cycles for? Please, anything but Chess.

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Krellan]

I haven't tried this, but have thought about it, and realized that it would be easy to parallelize chess. Each CPU thrown at the problem would allow better chess to be played.

Chess is basically a decision tree. Computer chess programs work by looking at future moves and evaluating them relative to each other. Each position of the board has a certain fixed number of possible moves that can be made from that position.

So, to assign a chess problem to N CPU's, look at the position of the board. See how many moves can be made. Assign each CPU a move, and have the CPU continue to evaluate based on the new board position resulting from that move. If you still have unused processors, then repeat this step another iteration (assign each CPU a board position that is two moves ahead, or three, and so forth). Continue to allocate CPU's until all are busy. If the number of CPU's isn't enough to cover all the possible moves, then have one CPU back off and just evaluate the board from its current position.

Basically, you are doing a breadth-first recursion to distribute the task among several CPU's. Then, each CPU runs as a conventional chess program from there, evaluating the tree of possible moves from its position.

This is a common technique, to my knowledge, and it is scalable to millions of CPU's (assuming sufficient network bandwidth)!

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Migrant Programmer]

As an example, take "would've" as the contraction in speaking "would have". The sound of the "'ve" bit is misheard as "of". Sure, sometimes it sounds like your saying "of", but it is NOT "of". It never has been. Some people are more familiar with the spoken form of English than the written - which is the reason for this error.

Be happy that you only live with such forms of this error. In North America, it is very common to hear people say "would of" out loud -- not just sounding like it, but actually saying it.

My computer was not one of the 2070, because the RIAA put a SLAPP on it because of the DMCA and the ASPCA.

Re:Draw game against 2070 CPUs?

[Bombcar]

Actually, I think that should be:

<BLUES BROTHERS>
Grammar Nazis.J.. I hate Grammer Nazis.
</BLUES BROTHERS>

In related news.

[Fat Jedi Kid]

Church rules chess is not the work of the devil, http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_859887.html The jury is still out on whether geeks are the spawn of the devil.

Results

[Stalyx]

"The game lasted several hours before resulting in a draw. Chess Grandmaster Peter Nielsen commented that he had set several traps for ChessBrain which computers normally fall for... but was surprised that ChessBrain refused them! "

So what does this tell us? Nothing really, however it would be interesting how the computer will perform in a 5 match series.

Although I still think the GM would win handily.

Re:Results

[cujo_1111]

Why do you believe that over a 5 match series the GrandMaster will win handily?

If ChessBrain refused some normal traps that computers normally fall for, then could it be the case that the computer is better than you realise. What if the drawn match was a bad one for the computer?

Re:Results

[azaris]

Why do you believe that over a 5 match series the GrandMaster will win handily?

If you look at the position at move 26, it's obvious ChessBrain is being pressured. In fact the article gives a possible move that could have resulted in ChessBrain losing. Instead Nielsen went for a forced draw because he only cared about not losing to a computer.

If ChessBrain refused some normal traps that computers normally fall for, then could it be the case that the computer is better than you realise. What if the drawn match was a bad one for the computer?

I suspect Nielsen sacrificed the win to see if ChessBrain would fall in his standard tricks, and when it didn't he settled for a draw. With that knowledge he'd probably play the second game much differently, and based on ChessBrain's poor position in the first game, would likely win.

But the fact that ChessBrain didn't fall in those standard traps tells us it's better than most computer opponents.

Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers running Beowulf?

Obligatory Slashdot Comment

[Crypto Gnome]

It's only a large aggregation, not really a cluster in that sense.

Anyway apparently it worked! (ie not a cluster in that sense either)

If it WAS implemented on the clustering technology we-all-know-and-love as Beowulf, would that make it a Beowulf-Squared?

And, of course, we have to ask the (obvious) question(s)

• Who was 13th?
• And did anyone Eat their Victims?

Re:Obligatory Slashdot Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's only a large aggregation, not really a cluster in that sense.

Nonsense!

Check your computing dictionary and find a definition of cluster - most people don't have to since they know that cluster is a group (two or more) connected computers working on a common task.

The task could be chess, or LS-Dyna, or BLAST, or something else.
Some tasks require shared memory, some don't, but there's nothing that makes shared mem clusters "real" and other unreal, fake or whatever.

Re:Obligatory Slashdot Comment

[oudzeeman]

Usually people in the supercomputing community don't call loosely coupled groups of computers on the internet running some distributed problem solver a cluster. Usually cluster refers to a more tightly coupled system.

PS

[Gogl]

It was a draw by repetition. The human grandmaster had a position advantage and was able to force a draw that way despite being down a significant amount of material.

Re:PS

[arvindn]

Not exactly. Nielson had a positional advantage but decided to force a draw anyway by sacrificing material to obtain a draw by repetition. Your version sounds more romantic, but is not accurate :-)

Re:PS

[Gogl]

Heh fair enough. Technically what I said is accurate, just omits that point about his sacrificing the material. Thanks for the clarification, though.

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a cluster of slashdotters imagining a Beowulf cluster of, oh wait... oh wait...

I love the topic icon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is OT, but I've never seen the "Puzzle Games" icon (Tetris T-block) before. It's neat, I like it better than the joystick. Maybe it could become the default "Games" icon?

featured on slashdot before.

[sciencewhiz]

This is Chessbrain's second appearance on slashdot. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/09/157257

Intangibles...

[John Seminal]

Computers playing chess is not the same thing as two people playing the game.

With two people, there are some elements that can not be programmed into a chess game. I remember in high school playing chess, there was a differance between playing a math academy team and a school best known for its basketball program. Expectations were different, the pressure was different. I remember the pressure of the state finals. There is the look the other person has, almost like poker. Can I bluff this person? Can I trick this person? What about the clock, can I manipulate that to cause an emotion in the other person.

Maybe Spock can play a PC and have no differance in quality of play. But I prefer humans.

Re:Intangibles...

[Seraphim_72]

Reminds me of the kid who was a year older than me who was in the Chess Club. Big guy, joined the Marines right out of highschool, played on the football team etc. Anyway, when he would go into a match he would pull out his chair about 5 feet or so - really far. He would then sit down in it, bend at the waist, grab the table and pull it over to him with the board and pieces jumping all over making a huge racket. It invariably ended up with him sitting at the table fiddling with his pieces while some shimp of a chess geek sat looking real scared about 5 feet away.

Sera

Re:Intangibles...

[cujo_1111]

Chess is a total mind game. However, there is also the other factor of 'sledging' (insulting) your opponent. No matter how hard you sledge your computer opponent, it will not react one bit.

Could be a good thing though, cos it won't leap over the table and punch you in the head.

I prefer to play chess with a friend whilst having a few drinks, makes the games much more relaxed and goes faster. Then you can bring in the added element of drink penalties for losing different pieces, losing your queen is a scull of what remains in your glass, but losing a pawn is just a sip.

Re:Intangibles...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if you can't win fair and square, win through gamesmanship. That's a good thing about computers - you have to win inside the game, not through some psychological bullshit.

Re:Intangibles...

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a guy in high school that, at such a tender age, had a penis pump installed because of some earlier trauma that left his member "lifeless", as it were. Unable to satisfy, if you catch my drift. For those of you who don't know, some penis pumps work based on air pressure, and the pump is installed in place of a removed testicle. When you need a dingo, you simply squish that ball until you've achieved the sufficient level of alertness.

So, this chap would wait for the game to start, and he's use his first minute thusly: he'd whip out his twig'n'berries, lay 'em out next to the board, and isolate that right ball-pump with his left thumb and forefinger. Right in front of his astonished opponent, he would then use his right fist and slam it repeatedly on that ball-pump, smashing it dead flat with each violent stroke. While doing this, he'd stare his opponent right in the face and say, "I can take the pain...in fact, it excites me!" Sure enough, right about the time he'd finish that sentence his man-at-arms would be armed and ready for combat. Then he'd simply put it away, make his first move, and punch his clock by slamming his right fist down on the button. Throughout the game, whenever he wanted to conjure the image, he'd slam that right fist on his clock button after a move.

Yep, I remember when we went to the state chess tournament. My friend pulled up a chair to his first opponent and waited for the go signal from the chess stewards to begin. Well, being state and all, he must have been way too keyed up. When the call to start rang out, he jumped up, sending his chair toppling backwards, whipped out his member and laid it flat on the table. He was moving a little too fast for his own good, though, and his first fist slam didn't find its true mark. No...sadly, instead, he ended up cock-punching himself directly into unconsciousness, right there before his horrified opponent's eyes. Apparently he caught a piece of his left ball too, because they had to remove that after this incident, and now that side of his sac just hangs there like a shriveled grape.

The point of telling this story is to say: I agree. Playing a human can be so much different from playing a computer.

Re:Intangibles...

[Anonymous Coward]

i disagree with your post. any game with people has a human element. as long as someone doesn't do anything against the rules, there is no reason to frown on it. it is a tactic. furthermore, just because someone might use psychology to gain an edge, it does not mean they are any less able with pure logic. do you really think that when grandmasters play each other, they do not use small psychological advantages, such as grins to make the other person nervous/use up more time?

Re:Intangibles...

[Anonymous Coward]

Chess is a game in the same sense that tic-tac-toe is a game.

For tic-tac-toe, an optimum strategy does exist and if both players use it, the result is a draw. The strategy can be expressed in a table of finite depth.

Chess falls into exactly the same game theory category as tic-tac-toe. There are no hidden elements, no randomness. Each player has perfect knowledge of the state of the game. An optimal strategy does exist, and I believe it is provable that when both players play perfectly, white wins. The optimum strategy can be expressed in a table of finite length. It's just that the length is something like 10^50.

Once that table is found, or an algorithm for generating the table from any given position is found, chess ceases to be a game and becomes a table lookup excercise, just like tic-tac-toe.

Re:Intangibles...

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of tactic works only against pretty poor oponents.

Re:Intangibles...

[HiThere]

Have you looked through a recent edition of MCO? Even since I was interested in chess, professional level chess increasingly involves memorization. If your opponent can force you into an opening that he knows well, and you don't, he has a very great advantage. People used to study and work to invent novel openings (just consider the Orangutang), but now it's reached the point where the well researched openings cover more than it's reasonable to memorize. This has changed the nature of the game. (For the worse to my mind, but changed it.)

You don't need to have a complete lookup table. You just need one that extends each line sufficiently far that it's easy to evaluate the position as either leading to a win, loss, or draw. The drawn positions are more difficult to evaluate, of course, because it's tricky. But there are so many drawn positions branching off the wins and losses that they, also, are tricky. Still, the size of the actual table needed is probably feasible, if one is really dedicated. Of course, it will still require much skill to take the "this is a won position" and actually deliver a win. When I was playing, I could never bring myself to memorize the lesser MCO openings (it was still possible then, back in the 1970's), but I was frequently able to win against those who were weaker in handling the mid game even though their opening gave them a decided advantage.

OTOH, if you are saying that all games of perfect information are identical...well, that's a perspective. There are theoretical positions from which it is useful. But the pratical positions from which it is useful are minimal to non-existant.

Re:Intangibles...

[Old Wolf]

Changed it for the worse, yeah. The result of this has been a lot of people playing "boring shit" openings -- ones where you don't have to memorise lines, like c4, e3, g3, Bg2 etc. slow systems. I hate it

Beowulf-ready Linux distros for chess computers?

[Debian Troll's Best]

This story reminds me of the frenzied Beowulf-mad days of a few years ago when it seemed every second story on Slashdot was about the rollout of a new Beowulf cluster somewhere (and of course spawned the '..imagine a Beowulf cluster of these' meme). Eventually, a few Beowulf customised Linux distros emerged, such as Scyld Linux, but you don't hear too much about these distros any more.

Which leads me to my question: Has anyone had any experience with these 'cluster ready' distros? Have they used them for the type of rollout described in the article (ie: chess-playing supercomputer)? What are your opinions on the package management included in the distribution, ie: does it make it easy to load packages onto several hundred nodes in a coordinated fashion? Would a massively distributed version of apt-get be a suitable solution in this problem space? Would it be possible to meta-manage a Beowulf cluster by using a massive distributed/parallel genetic algorithm to autonomously develop a distributed apt-get manager rather than tie up precious Debian developer resources? What could happen if apt-get developed a kind of primitive sentience, backed by a 256-node Beowulf cluster? I look forward to the community's feedback!

2070 CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. Even now computers need to cheat at games.

I'd like to see a Beowulf cluster of Chess Grand Masters take on Big Blue.

Re:2070 CPUs?

[Austerity Empowers]

If it's anything like using a beowulf cluster of engineers to design ...anything... you'll get umpteen fights, someone will go to the hospital, they'll fork the game into N fragments, and the audience will die before the first move can get made by anyone.

Comp. vs. Comp.

[John Hurliman]

I want to see this cluster take on IBM's system!

GM vs. thousands of humans?

[schm00]

Has anyone ever written a system by which a large number of average chess players could collaborate to play a single game? The individuals could vote for the best move, and the majority would rule. Would a group like this be able to beat a high ranking player?

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[vec sibarra]

Offhand, I would think not. Tests with monkeys have shown that intelligence is not cumulative. Ten half-power monkeys just can't equal five regular monkeys no matter what, to put it simply. Assuming that each player acts intelligently, i.e. non-randomly, there is about epsilon chance of them winning. Where epsilon is the chance that one of those players does act randomly... and randomly picks the best move... enough times to win. 0.02EU

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[sciencewhiz]

There are many systems like this. Chessworld.net is one, and they just challenged chessbrain to a match. You can see a full list of chessworld.net's ongoing games here: http://chessworld.net/chessclubs/event_show_chessw orld_summary_rowgames.asp

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Has anyone ever written a system by which a large number of average chess players could collaborate to play a single game? The individuals could vote for the best move, and the majority would rule. Would a group like this be able to beat a high ranking player? "

This is a very interesting question. And not only for chess. Is possible to improve a collaborative system in a way that the whole would be bigger than the sum of the parts? I dont know but it would be an interesting system. Probably we will see attents in the future.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[barfy]

This was done, in Kasparov v World.

It was done on the Zone.

http://classic.zone.msn.com/kasparov/Home.asp

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[TheLink]

No. Popular != best. 100 average people just gets you an average mob. If the average person is an expert then perhaps it works, but the average person isn't an expert.

Many average eyes only make obvious bugs shallow. You need skilled eyes.

A chess grandmaster aided by a bunch of high powered chess computers and programmes, might be able to beat the world number 1. The grandmaster provides strategy, and tells the computers which paths to look into. The computers provide search depth and protection against stupid mistakes.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[ameoba]

Hrmm... Well, if you consider /. a trial-run at a system for collaborative intelligence, I think we failed it.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[bomblaster]

To quote from a proverb,
"A hundred fools together cannot beat a single wise man"

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[JuggleGeek]

Would a group like this be able to beat a high ranking player?

I seriously doubt that the group would win. Some of the moves suggested by individuals in the group would likely be the best choice. But more votes would probably come in for another move - one which doesn't hold up as well.

Some time back, I saw an average or slightly above average player play "everyone at the event" by allowing anyone who wanted to make one move in the game. Many people felt this put him at a disadvantage. But it actually gave him a huge advantage. 10 people make make reasonable moves - but all it takes is one guy to make a really stupid move, and now the individual has a big advantage over the "group".

Chess is a game of mistakes. If neither side makes a mistake, draws are very common. That's why when you see games between two GM's, you see a lot of draws. In games where both are "average" players (not serious chess players) then mistakes are common, and generally the guy that made the last mistake is going to lose. (Not always - especially if he already had a demanding lead at the time.)

Things that look very minor - or which are not noticable at all to the average player - are very important to top players. Letting 5,000 average players vote on each move pretty much guarantees that any slightly-above average player would win.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[vidarh]

As others have pointed out, voting would be unlikely to work. I think that real collaboriation could, but the game would be impractical. The problem is that voting doesn't get you any benefit, and destroy any hope of a coherent strategy. Put together a proper group of people and let them discuss and educate eachother on the proposed moves and you might get somewhere, but coordination would be hell.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[swb]

The grandmaster provides strategy, and tells the computers which paths to look into. The computers provide search depth and protection against stupid mistakes.

This would be more interesting than a plain vote, which as you note would just aggregate mediocrity.

Rather than a grandmaster or other real expert, for which there are limited pools of, perhaps you could use a voting system with the computer(s) providing the choices, and the users voting on the choices the computer made? While this might be less intelligent than a true expert guiding what amounts to number crunching, it's more suggestive of a collaborative system that can provide a "thinking upgrade" to non-experts, which may have broader applications.

This way the machine is able to benefit from aggregated human choices without being a complete victim of mediocrity, and the humans are able to benefit from the machine's ability to eliminate choices through its inherent advantage, brute force. Perhaps it could be taken a step further, and give the machine the option of picking from the top two or three human choices.

I'm enough of a chess player to know how the pieces move but no more, so I don't know how important it is to stick to a strategy beginning to end or if its more important to be able to switch strategies in the middle.

But either way, the idea of using massive computing power to improve human decisionmaking is intriguing, particularly if you can have a collaborative process that raises the abilities of both non-experts and machines at the same time.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[CastrTroy]

A friend of mine wrote something like this as part of his distributed computing course. Also know another group who did a UT 2003 mod which kind of worked like chess in real time. Pretty cool.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[Zak3056]

Has anyone ever written a system by which a large number of average chess players could collaborate to play a single game?

Several years ago, there was a "Kasparov Against the World" event, wherein people could log into the net and vote for moved suggested by 5 grandmasters. This failed miserably (i.e. people sought to fix the voting, thus ruining the experiment.)

OTOH, WorldChessNetwork does a "Grandmaster v. Everyone" event once a week or so, where all logged in players play against a GM by discussing, and then voting for the move. I've NEVER seen the GM lose.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[TheLink]

The best way to benefit from the masses+computers? Given that "best" in this case is easily defined, you can use the "survival of the fittest" approach.

Get the masses to play each other with computers providing assistance (depending on what sort of player you want). Top winner plays grandmaster/number 1 in the world. Genetic algorithm if you may.

Many average eyes/people = good at avoiding obvious mistakes. Computers = very good at avoiding obvious mistakes.

Computers so far aren't as good as the top humans at picking the right paths in chess.

Chess isn't just about avoiding obvious mistakes - it's about picking the right strategies/paths.

Despite the tons of moves a chess game could possibly have, not all moves are typical. Similarly data compression algorithms still work in most cases despite the tons of possible combinations data could have.

Heh good luck finding the right algo/model tho ;).

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[swb]

Get the masses to play each other with computers providing assistance (depending on what sort of player you want). Top winner plays grandmaster/number 1 in the world. Genetic algorithm if you may.

Maybe the trick is to get the masses to play the opposite side, kind of a devil's advocate -- have the machine provide it's suggestions to the humans who then evaluate its options by playing against them. This feedback could be used to asses its own N+1 strategies and perhaps dismiss those that were blocked more easily or better anticpiate opponent moves that are "wildcat" moves that would otherwise be unexpected.

And rather than simple majority rule voting, perhaps a better idea would be a statistical scoring system which would enable the machine to track its human input and weight the choices over time in favor of those that worked better or contributed more to its strategy -- eliminating or discounting those that were less valuable.

Geeze, this is kind of fascinating. I should have played more chess or not switched to PoliSci from CompSci...

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[mikeg22]

You would just end up with an average move by doing this. Majority rule is not a parallel system...unless you split up the problem between the players there would be no benefit in this.

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of average chess players?

Re:GM vs. thousands of humans?

[MBraynard]

ACtually, yes. Microsoft's Gaming Zone had a tournament against Kasparov. Each day all zone members could log in and vote for which move to make. There were message boards where humans could argue about what move to make. In the end, Kasparov spanked the humans pretty good.

What's the big deal?

[gbulmash]

The General Manager of some Danish company plays a big chess computer. It would be more interesting if it was a Grand Master... oh.

Damn multiple-use acronyms.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genetically Modified?

That'd be cool...

Re:What's the big deal?

[TwistedGreen]

and here I thought it was 'Game Master'...

I was thinking: A chess role-playing game? Now that's news for nerds!

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

imagine if General Motors played chess... would'a just run over the dude with a big SUV!

chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[Doc Ruby]

It's really "10 trillion neurons" vs. "2070 CPUs", but the neurons are about 40Hz, while the CPUs are in the GHz class. My bets are on the homegrown favorite, the MPP integrated analog processor with the "intuitive" OS. Although v2 of the digital SW will benefit from the digirally-distributed analog MPP network of metaprogramming, and might come out on top in round 2.

"Chess is for computers" - Usenet 1997

Re:chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[jacobcaz]

• "...will benefit from the digirally-distributed analog MPP network..."

Ahh, digiral, must be some new Japanese technology! What will they think of next?

Re:chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the brain was actually clocked closer to 1000Hz (the time it takes a fired neuron to recharge for another firing). Still, point taken: clock speed is irrelevant if you don't know how much work is being done per cycle.

Re:chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[Anonymous Coward]

but the neurons are about 40Hz

and have been evolved and trained for a billion years... (I mean, not specifically trained for chess, but for survival -- problem solving, that is).

Re:chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[Doc Ruby]

Most of the evolution of the neural net since the invention of chess (in Persia 1000y ago) has been the OS: a natural language preprocessor for a nD geometric value metaphor. But with wetware, there's no sharp distinction between software and hardware, it's a glorious mess.

Re:chorus of tortises vs. array of hares

[Doc Ruby]

My "clock speed" of 40Hz is actually the rate of the optic tract (retina -> visual cortex), FM rate of K+/e- ion waves down their axon, not neurotransmitter molarity peaks in the synapse. So these wetware DSPs have onboard performance, and LAN performance. Neurons aren't centrally clocked, although there are polyrhythms through the network that keep some distributed cycles sync'd. Although complex, with manifold feedbacks, the neuron itself is mostly executing a Multiply-ACcumulate operation on its dendritic inputs. The network is the computer. I'm interested to learn more about different signalling frequencies in different nerve tissues.

computers and chess is still no biggy

[f00duvoodu]

Really I still dont see what all the hype has always been with computers and chess. While chess is a decent strategy game, it no way compares to go(igo). No computer to this day can really be considered a go competitor. Though the day that computers can play go against strong players is when will we probably have true AI of human level.

Even in the AI feild they believe when go is a better measure for thought capacity for a computer than chess...so once again.. just another chess game. I want to see the go games start, when that happens I will be alot more excited about the news, and actually read through the kifu(match record) of the games played, though it probably does help that I do like go more so i find it more interesting than chess.

heres the wikipedia section on go, its got links for probably any other question you might have and even mentions AI and go and the difference in the amount of moves between chess and go(go has a heck of alot more).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(board_game)

Re:computers and chess is still no biggy

[vidarh]

It's hyped because a) more people in Europe and the US at least "know" chess, at least the basics, and b) it's reasonably easy to get a chess program to a level where it will beat beginners, and doable to get it to a level where the best players around will find it a challenge. The latter is important because the problem is mostly academical until the programs reach a reasonable quality. I know that Go is interesting from an AI perspective, but it's also an extremely hard problem. Chess is hard, but you can get fairly far by combining good historical data, heuristics and sheer brute force (minimax variations) on the game tree, and any AI approach is about moving from good to world quality - you don't have to struggle just to give beginners a reasonable opponent.

Re:computers and chess is still no biggy

[Mhtsos]

In most computer architecture papers, GNU's go and not a chess program is used as a benchmark. Still I think I read someware that computer go programs are still no match for professional go players, go being more complex than chess. If that is really the case I can see why people would be waiting for computers to gain an advantage over pro chess players before they tackle go.

Perfect!

[ztwilight]

Finally! A computer that can really give me a run for my money! Where can I get one of those? I can't wait to take one to a LAN party! What a hit I'll be!

Losing to Computers

[rynthetyn]

It's gotten to the point that even Kasparov is only playing the best chess computers to draws. Of course, he did lose to Deep Blue, but despite all his insistance that IBM cheated, he got beat mentally, not necessarily because the computer was better.

Incidentally, there is a new documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine about the Deep Blue rematch, which I had the opportunity to see at the US premier a few weekends back. I'd link to the review I wrote on my blog, but I don't think the sysadmin would be very happy with me if I did.

Re:Losing to Computers

[Vellmont]

Of course, he did lose to Deep Blue, but despite all his insistance that IBM cheated, he got beat mentally, not necessarily because the computer was better.


But that's part of the game. You can't seperate the mental part of the game from the psychological part of the game. This is one of the big advantages that computers have, they don't get psyched out. It might be more fair to say that Deep Blue didn't beat Kasparov at his best. The computer always plays its best game, humans only some of the time.

Which begs the question ..

[RedLaggedTeut]

If you place the neurons in a freezer, by how much can you overclock them ?

LIKE MY WIFE...

[Anonymous Coward]

...she is BOOOOORING!

Re:LIKE MY WIFE...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should use a monkey puppet.

Google Julia fractals image - OFFTOPIC!! hehee

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in...

Checkout the current google logo at google.com. Julia fractals... ohhh, nice eye candy.

aut0tr0ll is teh sp0kE!?

[CHECKTHEGOATS]

Hello master.

sid=95288
formkey=oV9hI76ENx

This is a joint venture that will be mutually advantageous to both parties involved.

Wonderful!

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers and humans playing chess ...Still no cure for cancer.

What about parallel GMs?

[pmcevoy]

All this parallel CPU processing is very well and good - but why don't these challenges become team (on the human side) challenges?

I understand that this is about the human mind vs computer algorithms/power, but surely there is an argument that most great human advances were made by teams of humans...

fur hats

[Doc Ruby]

Vodka-cooled Russians have traditionally dominated the field.

Re:fur hats

[Loki_1929]

" Vodka-cooled Russians have traditionally dominated the field."

But when the Americans transitioned to 90nm SOI, we got Bobby Fischer, who required no cooling at all.

Then again, he went pretty nuts and disappeared for a while, so perhaps a heat sink would have been a good idea.

2070 CPUs? How many is enough?

[SPYDER Web]

For those who didnt bother to check who won, it ended in a tie.2070 cpus couldnt beat one brain...that says a lot about the complexities of the human brain. But the question is why are we doing this? Do we want the computers to win? Do we want to create the ultimate computer who knows more than we do and can do it better?

Re:2070 CPUs? How many is enough?

[Mhtsos]

What we want is for a computer to be able to preform a simple mental. The object of all reaserch on chess is not to provide competition for pros but to evaluate how well we can train a computer to mimic a human thought process. Results from this research could be used to train computers to drive, grade essays, develope math theorems, semantically understand human speech. Chess is just a good enough training ground for now as it's well defined, deterministic and hard enough (for a few more years anyway).

2070 CPUs

[Duncan3]

1 CPU to beat the GM.
+2069 CPU's so it could get on Slashdot.

There are very few humans on the planet that can beat even one computer. That's been true for how many years now? Neither beating a GM or 2070 CPU's is impressive anymore.

Someone go built a robot that can shovel snow, now THAT would be useful.

Re:2070 CPUs

[SpringRevolt]

Absolutely.

Playing chess is the easy part.

Walking up the steps to the podium, shaking hands, making some quip about the silly hats some of the audience are wearing, then actually moving the bits... that's the hard bit.

Re:2070 CPUs

[WetCat]

I cannot understand why the comment is "Funny" moderated. It should have been marked as "Insightful"...

aut0tr0ll is teh sp0kE!?

[Jack Froidalbungle]

Hello master.

sid=95288
formkey=xEOwQSf71S

This is a joint venture that will be mutually advantageous to both parties involved.

Tunable ELO rating

[salimma]

... should allow humans to play chess against their computers. I think Windows chess games already do this; the GNUchess and Crafty engines played through xboard or eboard, on the other hand, seems to only allow limiting difficulty by search depth and background thinking. One can't even have assymetrical chess clocks.

There is a way out for the last problem - set the game to Human vs Human, play your first move, and then run Black's clock down before you hand it over to the computer. Awkward and won't work if you want to play Black, though.

Go?

[firewood]

Why not try this for the Oriental game of Go, where even a few thousand computers might not make a decent opponent for a mid-level professional?

Re:Go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off, you post the same comment every time. Please remove Michael's cock from your mouth and try to think of something original to say.

It's like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Chess - 2070 CPUs vs 1 GM

Reminds me of that scene from Matrix:Reloaded where Neo fights ~2070 agent Smiths to a draw...
Except that this is not part of a crappy movie, oh... and no kung-fu.

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Beowulf Clusters You!

We may start losing on just about everything

[Moderation abuser]

While at the moment we seem to be the ultimate connection machines with 100 billion neurons and unimaginably large numbers of neural interconnections, that isn't necessarily going to last.

e.g. These guys are attempting to replicate the complexity of the human brain. Do I think they'll succeed? I wouldn't bet against them given the increasing understanding of the brain and the easy availability of cheap distributed processing.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-03o.html
h ttp://www.ad.com/

Obsolescence isn't as far away as you think it is.

Not enough machines

[Knx]

The supernode was obviously lacking an Intellivision cluster. I'm gonna port the ChessBrain client to IntyOS right now. Er ... wait ... 2070 Intellivisions would still be a little less powerful than a single 2GHz CPU. Oh damn!

CPU vs BUSH

[dutch_admin]

Take one 80286 CPU and you can beat Bush in any way...

Atleast

[katalyst]

deep blue was one machine... here the GM can claim to have beaten thousands of machines all working against him..

Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[chendo]

You realise that number is absolutely puny compared to Go?

Go is played on the intersections of 19x19 lines. A game starts off with no stones on the board, and black plays first. Black can place a stone wherever he wants, and so can white except in some circumstances.

Using my rather limited maths skills, let's calculate the possibilites of the first ten moves (not counting possible captures).

(19 ^ 2) * (19^2 - 1) * (19 ^ 2 - 2) * (19 ^ 2 - 3) * (19 ^ 2 - 4) * (19 ^ 2 - 5) * (19 ^ 2 - 6) * (19 ^ 2 - 7) * (19 ^ 2 - 8) * (19 ^ 2 - 9)


33147774514824216526540800 (done in bc)

That's the first ten moves. So, let's just imagine a match, with half the board filled and no captures are made. To make it simple, I'm just going to leave out the n-1 thing.

(19 ^ 2) ^ ((19 ^ 2) / 2)

22454135703741480247312986583970147937178662298077 58933986236005891626399446797707097420467137712625 30248956372964427814806611364222697658052744235366 07216617594180996820205758206078300865047460451496 71279695411300948553716685088048372686299464420447 83716355632768205849612093612903206606491136072744 05859807802611091046588995611364822335164659068180 23960517953048171586213593050675848790270895396181 75910922986480450845192545768285400487510964024764 65994480801

Of course, Go games could go on for infinity. The best Go programs are at the level of a 10-kyu player, which is only intermediate. Therefore, I reckon Go is a pretty damn intricate game ;p

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[johntromp]

With a sensible rule like Superko (You cannot move to a position which has previously occured), Go games CANNOT go on for infinity. They can however easily go on for 2**155 * 206, or about 10**49 moves, as explained on http://senseis.xmp.net/?path=Speculation&page=Numb erOfPossibleOutcomesOfAGame -John

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[johntromp]

With a sensible rule like Superko (You cannot move to a position which has previously occured), Go games CANNOT go on for infinity.

They can however easily go on for 206*2**155, or about 10**49 moves, as explained on

http://senseis.xmp.net/?path=Speculation&page=Numb erOfPossibleOutcomesOfAGame

-John

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[chendo]

Ah, yes. I forgot about that rule. Sorry.

So has anyone actually figured out the total possible game combinations?

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[Anonymous Coward]

this was on a link posted earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(board_g ame)
part named nature of the game it has the calculations for the possible amount of moves in go, and they are alot higher then chess's

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[Wargames]

I would love to have the time to sit down and play a game with 10**49 moves. Then again, it would be a terrific pain in the keister.

Re:Puny compared to the complexity of Go.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... Imagine if a chess board was 19 x 19.

GO certainly contains a very large play space. Though I don't think that necessarily means it is "complex"; its just gosh-darn-aweful big.

I wonder though, could there be a set of "local" rules that would greatly simplify a global outcome of the game (mathematically speaking). There was some stuff floating around various EDUs on "local rules --> global behaviour". Perhaps the threshold for 'seeing' this is just beyond a humans ability to crunch the numbers, but with the help of a computer perhaps there are attainable GO solutions that don't require the brute force method needed to 'solve' chess.

WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The man mentioned 'Go' in a chess-discussion!

Congrats!! ;-))

closed source client :(

[pixelbeat]

I wouldn't take part as the client
is closed source. I asked for it and
was politely told sorry, no chance.

Re:closed source client :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you got to understand. Closed source for a distributed project is a good thing, because people can tamper with the client and make it give bad results, or the results you do not want.

Pretty Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty obvious, after analysing the game, that if they'd had 2071 computers, they would have won.

Must be too early to read slashdot...

[Mawen]

> and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate).

I had always wondered why people ran SETI@home; now I know: they have given up on mating fellow humans (Is their self esteem that low? Has obesity gotten that bad in America?) and are looking to find love with aliens, once we decrypt the personal ads they have been sending us via interstellar radio.

(I think ambiguous appositives like these are a good reason to switch to Lojban)

I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this Perl code?

Am I doing my maths correctly?

[Knx]

There are approximately 35 moves per position in Chess (average value). Thus, the branching factor of the search tree is ~35 with a simple min-max search. Assuming that the program is always picking the best move to search first -- which is obviously not systematically the case -- alpha-beta pruning allows us to get a branching factor equal to approximately the square root of 35, that is: close to 6.

Assuming that 2070 CPU are able to do the calculations 2070 times faster than 1 CPU -- which, again, is not the case -- it appears that the resulting supernode is able to 'see' up to 4 or 5 half-moves deeper than a single CPU in the same amount of time:

6^4 < 2070 < 6^5

It doesn't seem to be *that* useful. For most strategical positions, thinking 5 half-moves deeper just doesn't make any difference. Game 3 of 'Kasparov vs X3D Fritz' is a good example: I'd be willing to bet that 2070 X3D Fritz playing together would have lost the game the same way, since the serious troubles caused by the pawns diagonal are still far beyond the resulting analysis depth. (Well... At least, I think so. I'm not a Chess expert!)

Anyway, this is quite an interesting project. I hope to see it grow up in the future.

-- Arnauld

Re:Am I doing my maths correctly?

[phkamp]

There is a difference between "participated" and "worked flat out on the problem".

In this case they had some serious bottleneck issues and at least the machines I had involved spent most of the time idle, throughout the game I probably got only about five moves per CPU, total.

Poul-Henning

Re:Am I doing my maths correctly?

[beelsebob]

First off, yes the average number of moves in chess is 35, however this looks at a lot of start games and end games for which fritz uses a chess database. If you look purely at the middle of the game, there are FAR more possible moves.

Secondly using alpha beta pruning only halves the branching factor, not square roots it, and this is in the optimal case - in the average case it gives gives you 3/4 of the branching factor.

The 2070 processors can actually get pretty darned close to 2070 times the power of 1, because they are each individually looking at a different move set - independent tasks mean they can all work at peak capacity

Also, looking a mere 5 moves deeper can give significant advantage - remember that optimisations like forced move unfolding are applied so it will likely be looking no deeper on unlikely moves, but 10 to 20 moves deeper on moves that look promising... This means that it can more easily see traps, quiescence etc.

Bob

In academic writing...

[tiltowait]

... you can always tell the abstracts that were written by the authors - because they read as a sales pitch for the article and don't include the experimental results - usually to the annoyance of the reader. Descriptive abstracts, which are a summary of the article and include the results, are often written by others (even a "professional abstractor/interer" at times.)

Dave Barry's blog is a good example of the former, Fark.om of the latter. In this story the editor should have added the results in the abstract.

This also answers that eternal question

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, an answer to the question "How many CPUs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

Trapping a computer...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article reads: "Chess Grandmaster Peter Nielsen commented that he had set several traps for ChessBrain which computers normally fall for... but was surprised that ChessBrain refused them!"

Could some chess geek please enlighten us mere patzers as to how one traps a chess computer?

In other news...

[Waffle Iron]

...Waffle Iron still hasn't taken the time to learn chess strategy; gets soundly beaten once again by a cluster of one Z80 running the chess cartridge on a 1992 vintage Gameboy.

Deep Blue was *Deep* in processors

[erick99]

Deep Blue was, indeed, a single computer but it had 516 processors that could assess 50 billion chess moves every three minutes. And that was 1997 technology! This machine was an RS6000 (RISC technology) that weighed 2,800 lbs and stood over 6' high. Perhaps in today's technology the equivalent would fit in a much smaller package.

Happy Trails,

Erick

Re:Deep Blue was *Deep* in processors

[xTown]

I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't verify it right now, but in "Behind Deep Blue," Feng-Hsiung Hsu, who built those chess processors, claims that you could fit a Deep Blue-class machine into something the size of a PocketPC today.

Don't see the big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

"Might of" is not being used as an explicit substitute for "might have," but rather its contraction: might've. Ditto would've.

Might've and would've are very similar, phonetically, to might of and would of. It isn't that great a mistake, and doesn't warrant a brain-flip to comprehend.

To hell with those spammers

[ChaosDiscord]

Chessbrain is kind of a cool hack, and I would respect that, if they weren't filthy spammers. Here is a typical Chessbrain spam. Notice the spam body image is hosted off of chessbrain.net. (Filthy, filthy, incompetant, spammers.

GM

[Khelder]

Did anybody else see the title and think, "What does a Game Master have to do with chess?"

Too much RPGing, I guess...

Re:GM

[Mhtsos]

He rolls the NPC's intelligence check silly.

Not smart enough computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter Heine Nielsen commented that he had set several traps for ChessBrain which computers normally fall for, but was surprised that ChessBrain refused them.

Maybe the computers weren't smart enough to fall for the trap?

Don't take this as an offense

[Knights who say 'INT]

but why does every chess player have funny hair?

Yes, it's offtopic, do be understanding

[Knights who say 'INT]

My first contact with GNU was GNU Chess on Win3.1, mind you.

It was a pretty good player (better than the other chess programs I had), but it was so desperately unstable, it'd crash at random times.

Sheesh, some things never change.

mod parent up!

[strook]

I don't think it's elegant either, the way humans play chess. Basically our strategy is

1. Think about the position and a few positions that pop into our heads

2. ????? - our subconcious does some inexplicable stuff

3. Profit! A grandmaster couldn't explain to somebody else how he does it. "Elegant" should mean something that was maybe hard to think of, but once it's explained to you it's so simple. Human chess-playing is anything but.

The same as SETI@Home?

[CyklopzII]

Am I the only one that noticed that the author directly compares the 2070 cpus to "playing S@H"? Uh, sorry but S@H has millions of cpus participating in its distributed project. Not the same at all. :) Cy

Poor performance by ChessBrain computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I've followed the Chessbrain effort for a while and just don't see the point.

Where are the chess playing strength benchmarks for Chessbrain? I don't think Chessbrain with 1000 distributed computers could beat Fritz running on one computer.

Chessbrain has failed to show an improvement in chess playing strength through the use of it's distributed program, and that really is the key point.

Finally, we can help!

[mlylecarlin]

Humans, join the resistance! Hack your copy of beowulf!

Seriously, though, this is stupid. Chess is a boring algorithmic game that has nothing to do with intelligence. It's no feat for a computer to win chess. Make a Go playing computer, and I will be impressed.

mlylecarlin

Grammar Tips...

[mojine]

In case you need to see the correct usage in print...

>he might of just won...

might have just won...

>team would of won

team would have won