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Chess Improves Machines and Humans Alike
erick99 writes "Chess provides a window into some more arcane philosophical matters. The remainder of this article will focus on two difficult, and interrelated, questions. The first has to do with the nature of reality; the second is about the prospects for human and artificial intelligence in grappling with reality. In both cases, the search for an answer leads through a board game with 32 pieces and 64 squares."
The article has little to do with the game of chess, it is a philosophical piece (it strikes me that invoking religion in a philosophical debate is a bit like invoking Hitler in any other argument...). It's a bit thin too - saying that you can use the same word to describe different things doesn't imply any necessary connection between those things; it could mean we interpret the word based on its context...
I have little time for philosophy: the endless soul-searching and argument over subtle nuance seems pretty meaningless - you can't root an argument in reality when you're debating the existence of reality! Accept that and move on. I happen to agree with Popper about falsifiability, but that's just an opinion...
Perhaps we ought to just accept the universe does exist, then perhaps we can start to do something useful rather than pursue ultimate logical deriveable truths (although I guess the Vulcans got their warp drive first, hmmm)... The greatest breakthroughs in science were made once the ancient Greek philosophic method was turned on its head and transformed into the scientific method we use today. Theory and practice, unified in harmony; either on their own regarded with suspicion - look at cold fusion and string theory...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
A group of chess enthusiasts had checked into a hotel, and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off.
"Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer."
Q. What's the difference between a chess player and a highway construction worker?
A. A chess player moves every now and then.
Which football team has a couple of chess pieces missing?
QPR
Q. What is the difference between a chess player and a couple on a blind date?
A. The chess player mates then chats......
Regards,
(courtesy of Graham Moore)
Q - Which group of women are the best chess players?
A - Feminists. Their opponents begin with King and Queen,
but *they* always start with 2 Queens.
Chess is not just a mentally challenging game to play. It is also a game that generates examples and analogies relevant to a broad range of intellectual concerns. If you do a search for "chess" here at TCS, you will find, among other things, Arnold Kling's discussion of man-versus-machine chess, Lee Harris's illustration in chess terms of the difference between rational and irrational enemies, Iain Murray's likening of Russian global-warming policy to a knight's move, and a piece by me noting philosopher Daniel Dennett's evocation of chess computers in his argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
I am a competent chess player (unlike Kling, that is), albeit no threat to the world's grandmasters. After falling off in participation for a few years, I have recently played frequently -- perhaps a bit too frequently -- aided by the ready availability of opponents at chess websites like this. I find the game to be not only fun but also rife with philosophical implications. It reinforces certain lessons of everyday philosophy, for instance the importance of trying hard (my games vary widely in quality, depending on effort and attention) and maintaining some humility (just when I think I've gotten good, someone comes along and wipes the board with me).
Chess also provides a window into some more arcane philosophical matters. The remainder of this article will focus on two difficult, and interrelated, questions. The first has to do with the nature of reality; the second is about the prospects for human and artificial intelligence in grappling with reality. In both cases, the search for an answer leads through a board game with 32 pieces and 64 squares.
Do Abstract Objects Exist?
No doubt, many college freshmen have rolled their eyes at the uselessness of Philosophy 101 when asked whether there exist perfect circles or other ideal entities. But a great deal rides on the longstanding philosophical debate about abstract objects. If, say, the number 12 has an existence independent of its particular manifestations in egg cartons and the like, then a view that the world consists solely of physical objects is inadequate.
This has potential religious implications; in a recent TCS essay, Edward Feser identified Platonism, or belief in a realm of abstract entities, as a key assumption underlying Western religion. Of course, believing in perfect circles does not necessarily entail believing in God; philosopher Keith Augustine has defended a naturalistic worldview that takes abstract objects into account. So, while debating Platonism will not settle an argument about religion, it does shake up easy assumptions about what does and does not exist.
To my mind, Platonism (whether in religious form or not) is a dispiriting philosophy. Its emphasis on another realm seems conducive to distaste for the messy, familiar world. Furthermore, as physicist Lee Smolin noted in his excellent book The Life of the Cosmos, Platonism calls into question whether there is any such thing as novelty. If the contents of the universe are just a playing-out of possibilities that exist in a timeless realm, then there is nothing truly new about them. Every flower, every mountain, every painting is merely a sample from a preexisting set of possible flowers, mountains or paintings.
What does this have to do with chess? The game actually complicates the question of whether abstract objects exist. Consider the Ruy Lopez, a common chess opening named after Ruy Lopez de Segura, a priest and chess expert in 16th-century Spain. White opens with a pawn, knight and bishop; black parries with pawn and knight, then decides how to respond to the bishop. The subsequent moves carry numerous, ramifying possibilities.
The various lines of attack and defense following the Ruy Lopez opening have different pros and cons. Some strategies are better than others. (The Steinitz Defense, where black pushes the queen's pawn on move three, is regarded as a bit dubious.) But no one has yet figured out any definitiv
If Chess has these implications, imagine what a good match of GO will do for you! Both man and computer alike! Simple to learn, arcane to master offering a lifetime of fulfillment.
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game. Though it's been a while since I've read this, so this may have changed. But this has been a reason why computer logic enthusiasts have been enthralled with this game for many a year.
A little offtopic...but...by the way, while on the topic of Go: did you know that the original selling price of KPT Bryce was determined over a game of go? Eric Wenger (the original developer who based all of the fractal math on the work of Ken Musgrave, originally an aprentice of Dr. Mandelbrot himself) thought that Bryce should be a "Hollywood Tool" and cost over $7000 (back in the early 90's!). But Kai Krause thought it should be a tool to "empower the creativity of the average person" and said the pricepoint should be set at $99.00
So they decided to let a game of Go decide it. Thankfully, Kai won the game!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
A zen master was once asked, "What is the greatest game ever invented by man?"
He replied, "Chess, of course."
His chela asked, "But, what of Go?"
The master replied, "There was go before there were men."
pandanet.co.jp
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
winning the game will double at least.
I'm sorry... this article feels like an infomercial for pseudoscience. With abstractions like "Does the number 12 exist?" I have to wonder why it made the cut to even appear on slashdot. We could also pretend we're Vulcans and talk about the deflector dish, but it certainly isn't worth slashdot coverage.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Funny, as the current trend in AI research is to eschew abstractions and modeling (referred to as GOFAI - good old fashioned AI) in favor of neural nets and the like. Adherents of embodiment look at chess as exactly the sort of problem stacks the deck in favor of the machines / can't tell us anything interesting about intelligence
Of course, chess is always solvable with sufficient computing power. There's really nothing interesting about it, just an optimized adversarial search tree with some function to evaluate how good board states are, maybe with a table of good endgames tacked on.
Of course, this is not much like the way that humans solve the problem
I personally would be much more impressed with a computer that could play baseball.
Those more interested in the aspects of computers and brute-force calculating power vs. human intuition in games like chess might find this article interesting.
The author predicts that while computers will one day defeat even the greatest chess Grand Masters, they will probably never be able to master the Chinese game of "Go".
I mostly agree, but don't forget about geometry/trig, etc...
It was a strange thing back then when philosophers said "Let's not measure things, not even REAL things, instead lets think of the IDEA of spatial relations". The idea of the line, equations, and all of those other fundamentals we all learn today. It was math in the philosophical sense. (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 ) (or the shortest distance between two points is....)
If that had never happened, if they hadn't stepped back from the drawing table to theorize and philosophize, we wouldn't have the solid mathematical foundation we have today.
So, the same may be said of other philosophies. Stepping back from reality, and thinking about things that seem unrelated may eventually turn out to be the exact opposite.
That explains why I never can beat a computer at chess. Whenever I get better, the computer gets even more better!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
are you sure you're not a 'bot?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Pandanet and IGS are okay, but if you really want to play Go with people who aren't assholes, try KGS - chad
I find the game to be not only fun but also rife with philosophical implications. It reinforces certain lessons of everyday philosophy, for instance the importance of trying hard (my games vary widely in quality, depending on effort and attention) and maintaining some humility (just when I think I've gotten good, someone comes along and wipes the board with me).
But then he goes on to make a discussion about platonism that could IMHO be made much better (and would be more interesting) in relation to mathematics.
It hapens that I have just (about two hours ago) written a short essay on how to improve in another board game. What I didn't dare saying there is that you cannot seriously improve in go without trying to improve get an overall positive attitude towards life, somehow trying to be on top of it.
I would certainly have loved to see a chess player's take on that topic. Chess is probably still a little more competitive than go (in the Western culture), and they might well know more about it than we go players do.
The article mentions this interesting invocation of chess in philosophy:
Daniel Dennett's evocation of chess computers in his argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
I find it far more interesting than the two the article DOES cover, i.e. whether ideal objects exist and whether computers will out-think humans.
If this comment has any particular point, it's that there are many interesting questions that are probably NOT covered by this article, and this might be an interesting forum to bring some of them up.
Somewhere deep in my heart, I was hoping that this would be the first slashdot thread ever to not mention go. You, sir, have smashed that hope. Oh well, Go rocks.
This article reads like an article on chess that collided with an article on DesCartes' philosophy.
_____
Thank you.
1. This is high-school grade philosophy
2. Platonism deals with this; you could create a potentially infinite number of chairs and none would match the original, ideal chair, but would be reflections of it on this plane.
3. WTF does this have to do with AI? Just because a computer can't always beat a human, as they are currently programmed and with the current available processors, means little to me. Computers can count from 1-1000 faster than I can, but that doesn't mean the computer can think. Why should the corollary be a problem?
Chess is also an interesting test case for one of Vinge's paths to superhuman intelligence. Namely, the idea that human/machine interfaces may become so intimate that we will in effect fuse with our technology, becoming superhuman in capability.
Kasparov, for example, has been advocating allowing mixed human/computer teams in "Advanced Chess" tournaments. It seems that the human/machine combination, with the right interface, yields far better chess play than either alone.
Some questions that fascinate me:
Frankly I find these more useful questions than the old human vs. computer debate.
Man, that's deep.
Chess isn't nearly as interesting for A.I. as we once thought it was. Essentially it's a closed, well defined formal system. These sorts of things are relatively easy to deal with, compared to problems like "Write a good essay about the history of chess". We have a pretty good idea how to write a really good chess program, but we have no idea how to even begin to algorithmically write a good essay.
Chess is essentially a math problem. "Real world" problems however are a completely different ball game. We need to answer some very interesting and fundamental questions before we can even begin to build any interesting A.I. (A theory of relevance being one, and the frame problem being another).
The young Russian Grandmaster, Kosteniuk, is much more exciting.
On the one hand, chess is a very interesting realm for understanding the realms of human and machine intelligence. It is an interesting microworld with enough complexity that it lacks brute force or close-form solutions. Thus it provides a useful test case for understanding rational action. And blitz chess is useful for looking at reasoning under time constraints.
On the other hand, chess is closed - a King will always be limited to moving one square in any direction. With chess, no new moves, new pieces, new board locations can ever appear. Chess is also certain -- there are no ambiguites in the locations of the pieces. With chess the rules and positions are fully known before hand by the exactly two players who adhere to the constraints of the game.
By contrast, the field of human affairs evolves continuously to create new scenarios, new possible movements, new roles, and new players. Everyday slashdot has articles about the novel activities of people (from scammers using TTY relays to new chipsets to new laws). I would argue that decision making under conditions that are uncertain, open-ended, massively multiplayer, and subject to changes in the rules are a bit different.
They say one must learn to crawl before learning to walk. In some ways, learning about the intelligence required to play chess is like learning to crawl. That even the decision making underpinnings of playing chess is so hard to understand says something about how hard it will be to understand true intelligence in open-ended situations the poeple deal with every day.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Go is for the people who are no good at chess so they have to GO and try to find another, more obscure game (to the West) to play.
This guy parses the existence-of-universals debate nicely, though I'd certainly argue against the individual who claims that belief in the existence of universals entails Platonism; plenty of metaphysicians accept the one without the other.
But my reason for posting was to point him, if he reads this reply, towards a writer he'll find very interesting. The philosopher John William Miller has a series of quite readable, philosophically acute books in which he presents the existence of universals in human experience precisely AS dependent on the existence of human practices like, for instance, measurement or chess. Once you have rules for chess, that is, new universals exist; universals don't necessarily preclude the function of creativity but rather are dependent on it. I'd start with Miller's "The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects."
For those who like their book recommendations with a little bio-info: Miller published hardly anything during his lifetime, mostly because he found the world of professional philosophy philosophically sterile. He taught at Williams for some ungodly number of decades, and when he died, a stack of manuscripts were discovered in his papers. One of his former students, who had become an editor at WW Norton, arranged to have several of them published in nice cheep paperback editions, which is why we now have the chance to read the stuff. It's quite good, if you have a taste for systematic metaphysics but can't swallow either Hegel or Whitehead.
The articles grasp of philosophy is suboptimal.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Today's philosophers of mind are asking the questions that direct AI researchers toward identifying and solving the interesting research problems.
Those of use who have studied and performed research in AI know that "android epistomology" (the study of the space of possible thoughts in an android mind) is a very vibrant and important topic that is widely debated. The term "android epistemology" was first coined by Clark Glymour in a sourcebook on this topic.
Rudolf Carnap was the first to combine propositional logic with natural language to come up with a general philosophy of high-level thought. His ideas were rigorous enough to be considered computer programs, and yet he came up with them in 1928!
Recently, we heard about the Robotic Race, a 150-mile race of autonomous vehicles, where the winner only made it 7 miles. Want to know why the winner didn't get farther? It got a tire stuck in sand, and wasn't "smart" enough to realize that flooring the accelerator wasn't doing any good, so it burned the tire off, right down to the rim. Had it included in its space of possible mental states the idea it could disengage an axle, it could have gotten out of its hole and kept going. It didn't have the "mental capacity" to step back, reflect, and consider an alternative idea.
The question of how we, as humans, are able to adjust our "space of mental thoughts" to external conditions is hardly even addressed in the modern AI literature, and yet it's precisely this kind of question that philosophers identify as an important problem and ask first!
So, we owe philosophy a debt for often framing the correct questions for other to later answer.
Any game where counting and remembering are good examples of games that could benefit from computer augmentation.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
It seems rather clear to me that abstracts exist. Obviously not in the physical sense, but they must exist. If they did not, we would have very little basis for calling two similar (but obviously different) objects the same. For example, if I saw two animals and had no abstract of what an animal was, how could I say it was an animal? If one was a dog and the other a cat, how could I differentiate unless I had some preconceived notion of what a dog was? Furthermore, if I saw a species of dog which I had never seen before and had no idea existed, how would I still know it was a dog without some abstract conception of what a dog is? Arguably, an individual thing, such as a particular dog, has potentiality (the potential to exist in reality) while an abstract always exists in reality, on the basis that it needs to physical status to exist. This could be applied to the question of AI and chess as well. Since it would seem practically impossible for any person or machine to hold all the possible (or abstract) variations on a chess game, there must be some way we arrive at 'new' undiscovered ways of playing. I would assume this to be something that chess programs tend not to use, behaving randomly. When faced with a decision, a human will often choose randomly or emotionally, possibly choosing what would seem a poorer choice. A chess program, especially one that is playing a particularly talented human opponent, would likely not suspect such acts, instead 'thinking' the opponent would behave in the most logical way possible. How we could teach computers intuition is anybody's guess.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
Holden: You look down and you see a slasdot troll, Leon. It's crawling toward you.
Leon: Troll? What's that?
Holden: You know what a loser is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Deckard (Harrison Ford) giving a test. You're deleting spam from your inbox. You come across a full page nude photo of a girl.
Rachael (Sean Young) Is this testing whether I'm a spammer or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?
At first i read it as cheese...admit it: most people here would be happier if it had really read Cheese improves humans..
Even better, GoZen, the game that can only be played by ethereal brain masses on the highest philosophical plane of existance.
Slashdot sucks
An interesting twist on chess is taking a position and attempting to deduce something about what must have occurred in the game previously. For example, has a promotion occurred or not? What must have been white's last move? I don't know whether there exist computer algorithms for solving these sort of problems - a brute force approach would probably be useless. It's possible to construct quite interesting and non-trivial puzzles of this sort. The logician Raymond Smullyan's delightful book The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes starts with some easy examples and builds up to some really mind boggling examples.
The world is everything that is the case
Come on, mods: here was a way for the grandparent poster to know whether another poster was a 'bot or not. That's on topic, isn't it?
Chess has proved the value of a brute force approach--even without a lot of AI routines, simply searching the game tree and adding up the value of the men left on the board is a workable algorithm. Good chess programs improve on that significantly with rules to prune the tree search, and further rules to score a board position. That doesn't work so well in Go: There are 361 points on a Go board, with a typical game lasting some 200 moves--an unimaginably large number of game combinations. Worse, there's no easy way to assign a value to a board position once you've brute forced your way through the combinations. The combination of these two factors is one reason why there are no really good Go playing programs, as there are in Chess.
Go is a great game to play on the Internet. You can order all the books you need to get you started, and then you can play on the 'net. There's not bad Go implementations at Yahoo Games, etc., but eventually you will move up to the real go servers like Kiseido or Panda, both located in Japan.
I've not time to say its URL, bye-bye.
open4free (c)
Why is go always brought up in a topic about chess? Are the two games related?
Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today... Imagine there's no countries, It isnt hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace... Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man, Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say Im a dreamer, but Im not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will live as one. - by John Lennon
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
This is so simple, and I should have known this
since birth, but I just figured it out:
What I say or do to you determines both
our futures, and I hope it is good.
I believe there are a few very basic
principles involved in our life. When
those things are discovered in your
mind, everything becomes perfectly clear.
It may be that life in all its complexity
is based on simple binary logic. Is it
just a choice between two things? I seem
to recall the word Choice as being important
in some world religions.
Your probably right. In retrospect, I see that my knee was jerking a bit.
For all who are interested Godwin's law states:
I want to know why if I program in some function that determines how good a board is, and the computer goes and tries all possibilities to a certain depth of moves to determine the best move using either a minimax algorithm or something like that, why is this considered A.I.? The computer isn't doing anything I didn't specifically tell it to do.
Wouldn't real AI be writing a program that plays a whole lot of chess and "learns" what makes a board/move good and that's how it decides how to play?
I just don't get why a computer playing exactly how it's programmed is considered AI and not learning anything on it's own (on its own is loose here, if it was specifically programmed to learn I'd still consider it learning on it's own).
For instance, we wrote a Kalah player in a CS class I was in. You know how my team decided how to rank boards, we wrote a program that cycled through thousands of possibilities for the different weightings of each pit and then compared the results when using those weightings. In my head, that's A.I., the computer just decided for itself what the best evaluation function was (albeit we told it how to decide) as opposed to simply using one we hard-coded in and having it search really deeply (which in my mind is not AI at all, just a computer playing a game).
To further the argument that concepts exist, I'll pose another question and try to answer it from what I believe would be your point of view. What are ideas? I'll assume we both agree that ideas exist--if they didn't this discussion would be rather difficult. I argue that they're concepts. You, being (from what I can tell) a materialist, would likely say that an idea is only a biological function of 'higher animals,' i.e. humans. You'd say an idea exists as electrical signals in the brain., received through the senses. But how would we discuss justice? You can't see justice. You can't feel it. You can't sense it at all, at least not with the five senses. Yet you have an idea of what it is. If you want to go with a strictly materialistic philosophy, all concepts exist as chemi-electrical signals in the brain, so they exist. If you insist, they may be merely a special arrangement of atoms, but they exist.
But just because you can talk about something doesn't mean it exists. For example, what about your pet elephant? I'm discussing it now, but it has never existed.
Just for clarity's sake, I'd like to specifically answer this. If I were to talk about my obviously non-existent pet elephant, it clearly wouldn't exist. But the concept of such a creature would. I'm not saying the creature itself exists. I'm saying the idea, the concept, does. You seem to be entirely missing the point.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
Senseis
I've always find it a bit amusing that Go enthusiats always have to get their say about how much better their game is (true or false is besides the point) whenever the subject of Chess is brought up. While, Chess enthusiats never have to do the same thing when Go was brought up. I play loads of chess, but I find Go interesting to talk about and won't say things like "Screw GO. Play chess."
:).
A bit like Linux advocates saying "Screw Windows. Run Linux." everything Windows was brought up.
I let the reader draw their conclusions about this statement
(P.S. I run linux both in the office and at home. And I am completely at loss in Windows).
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Don't want to flame, but the article does seem like a bunch of "pseudo-intellectual" (forgive me for using that phrase) 14 year olds sitting around, playing chess and thinking their minds are advanced. Half way through the article I thought they would break out matrix-like statements saying "there is no pawn."
Seriously, it just sounds like a half-assed book on Hume or such that somehow had pages of "Chess for Dummies" inserted randomly.
That is one search. The correct answer is 42.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Go back and read Mind Children (near the end, about Hashlife) [Moravec] and Permutation City [Egan] ...
\begin{blah}
check out this MSRI Publication for an interesting discussion on {\em Games of no Chance}. These are games where $2$ players alternatively play and each has complete information. Also the game is bound to terminate with the winner being the last person to move. Chess also falls under this category, as do many other interesting combinatorial and topological games like Go, Ko, Checkers etc. While some like Checkers have been tamed, others like Chess or Go refuse to give up.
\end{blah}
Go karma, go
Did the Ruy Lopez exist before its 16th-century namesake started playing it? A Platonist might say it did, as part of an abstract set of all possible chess openings. But chess itself has a finite history. The game originated around the seventh century A.D., and its modern rules became standard in the 15th century, not long before Ruy Lopez de Segura was playing. Platonic ideals are normally defined as timeless, yet in this case they seem also to be historically grounded. The world of abstractions seems to depend on our world.
Does that mean that the number Pi didn't exist before it was discovered? It did, Platonism as he refers to in this article at least, is just stating that fact that that number although not defined (hence taken a particular meaning for us humans) has always existed.
Saying that Pi didn't exist before we noticed it is equivalent to saying that the outter most particles in the universe, the ones propelled by the big bang, don't exist since there's no way for us to reach them (they are moving at the speed of light outward).
Perhaps in some sense, all chess moves, positions and games are "out there," but they have a rather limited existence if nobody plays them. Interestingly, it appears physically impossible for any computer or other material entity ever to store complete information about the game. By some estimates, the number of possible chess games exceeds the number of particles in the universe.
Here's one, the number of different pathways a neural signal can take through the brain is WAY higher than the number of particles in the universe... does that mean we can't form some of these because nobody would be able to count them?
Both of these paragraphs don't add anything to the text, IMHO.
Anyone care to tell me otherwise in a logical manner?
you might want to review modal and symbolic logic.
I'll leave you to use the google.
If I remember right...
possable worlds end up being sets of true/false values for logical propositions. Actually they end up being the infinite set of what the actual true/false value of all the possible (logically possible) propositions actually are.
And since sets for different possible worlds may(must? any logicians out there?) differ. Any imperical knowledge has nothing to do with proving
or disproving possible worlds.
What you would need to do, to disprove the existence of all other logically possible worlds, is to ground your argument with premisis whose truth value is known to you apriori.
Imperical knowledge is not gonna get you there.
because the sort of truth/false value it illuminates as true or false is about our particular logically possible (and actual) world.
Exististential rather than universal propositions in other words. You can disprove a universal proposition with an exististential one, but proving a universal proposition from a existential one doesn't work.
Pandanet was formerly known as IGS, and can eat your time worse than /. any day.
Read, L
I don't get the impression you've played for very long. Now of course you're entitled not to enjoy Go and play something else, but don't go around claiming it's a "simple" game, with no "real and interesting" nuances. You say that the complexity arises out of the magnitude but in fact even a Go game played on a 9x9 board is interesting on a tactical level. 19x19 is not more interesting merely because it has more combinations, but because it adds strategic depth as well as increasing the importance of phenomena like ko fights, joseki and pincer attacks (do you even know enough about Go to know what I'm referring to here?).
19x19 tic-tac-toe has plenty of "nuances," too, I'm sure. And the same holds for 19x19 othello/reversi, checkers, etc.
Comments like this are what make me think you haven't given this any thought. This is just false. Tic-tac-toe on 19x19 would obviously not add much depth to the game (playing it on different topologies like Klein bottles and 4-dimensional space does, though :). Othello and checkers would not get much benefit either, because pieces in those games only have power in close proximity. Go benefits from a large sized board because the objective is territory-grabbing, not killing your opponent.
Beginners often don't see what's so deep about Go. For example, I might play a piece somewhere, and the beginner watching my game sees me just playing a piece in a random-looking position on an empty area of the board. But in fact, the move has a great deal of strategic significance: I'm loosely connecting a group which has insufficient eye space as well as establishing territory on the left side, and I carefully choose the fourth line instead of the third to cancel out my opponent's advantage in the center. Moreover, to choose this move above all possible others, I had to examine the rest of the board to decide there are no urgent tactical situations nor more efficient strategic moves elsewhere. There was a great deal of complexity in my move, and I may well have given it 30 seconds of thought before making it. And this wasn't just stupid examination of combinations but real, deep strategy, as good as striving for a positional advantage in chess. "Simple" indeed.
And I'm not even getting into the variety of tactical situations. Life-and-death, capturing races and the various tesuji situations can necessitate reading ahead the tree of moves up to 10 moves in advance. Go is just as analytical as chess, especially in the endgame.
Now I would not claim Go is more interesting than chess --- both are very deep games --- but if you think Go involves less nuance or less deep strategy than chess, you haven't examined it on any but the most superficial level. You've been fooled by the fact that the rules are so simple. But I can only point out that the rules of logic are also very simple, and yet the whole of mathematical theory springs out of them.
Really? All the ones in my kitchen seem to be black. Hmm.
They're both abstract strategy games that are very widely played - more than any other board games, in fact. They're also pretty much the top two board games you can play in terms of that elusive quality called "depth" (Go, I think, is deeper - so deep it's a bit daunting to most people when they try to learn it). So some people see them as rivals. Which I suppose they are in the sense that you only have so much time, and either game will require a lot of it if you want to get strong.
But in terms of gameplay mechanics, they're almost nothing alike, and not related historically (chess is likely descended from an Indian gambling game circa 500 CE - Go is about 1500-2500 years older and probably from China).
Its not right to say Chess is of no value to AI - the best programs combine brute-force extentions with a variety of auto-learning methods from the leading edge of AI. However a strong Chess program is not quite the big thing that some thought it would be, thats true..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The master replied, "There was go before there were men."
So you're saying it was invented by women?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Chess is beginning to look like that. It yields to brute force. And by modern computational standards, not very much brute force. "Deep Fritz" tied 2:2 with Kasparov running on a desktop 4-processor IA-32 machine. Kasparov says it plays better than Deep Blue, which was a roomful of custom IBM hardware. If you haven't been on the cover of "Chess Life", "Deep Fritz", running on a standard PC, can trounce you. And it's only US$110.23.
Many people dont know about this game yet. But, it uses a standard chess set and is 1000x harder for computers than chess. I've tried it and was able to beat the computer; something I've never been able to do with chess.
http://www.arimaa.com/
Scott