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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."
I agree with you that philosophies that debate the existence of reality, or talk about "alternate realities" and the relative degrees of reality between them are quite frankly a waste of time. Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism has a set of very logical axioms on which the rest is constructed. You may or may not agree with EVERYTHING she says, but in my opinion her views on consciousness, reality and free-will are right on the target.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
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".
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).
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 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.
Forget true master, no current GO program can challenge much more than a raw n00b at the game. The highest rated programs are around 10 - 15 kyu, which is to say they play better than a rank amateur, but not by a lot, and suffer from the fact that they can be confused into making horrible moves if you exploit certain flaws in their AI. Once you learn what moves exploit their weaknesses, you'll beat them everytime no matter how bad you are.
A huge branching factor and the lack of anything remotely approaching a clear evaluation algorithm will probably hamper computer Go for years to come.
I don't think Platonists claim that, I think the claim is that ideas exist before-hand, and are mapped into the universe. When you say 'underlying abstract structure', it somehow implies that there is only one 'set' of ideas which are all structurally linked which guide the universe... I disagree with that in that there could be an infinite number of ideas, which form an infinite number of disjoint sets of structure. The mere fact that I can think of a world where gravity would repel instead of attracting is proof enough that that idea exists. Yet it is certainly not linked in any way to our current reality/universe.
That being said, if Math had developed from different axioms, and Pi wasn't found, it wouldn't mean that it doesn't exist since we cannot base our empirical verification to prove the idea exists. Further more, even if the Universe was actually structurally different to the point that Pi didn't have the significance it has for us, it would still exist - just as the idea of a repelling gravity exists in my mind.
I realize that the prize of this cogitation is not mental mind-blowing, but I am also not really satisfied with the logical chain and conclusion that it brings out.