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."

Comments

Vulcan science

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Vulcan science

[IceAgeComing]

It often starts out that way.

Once interesting issues are framed, they sometimes get answered and a new concrete subject area is born.

Mathematics and geometry are two examples. We would hardly call those fields "religious argument" today, although it may have seemed that way at first.

Re:Vulcan science

[kfg]

I did not mean to imply that philosophy has been without merit within the span of human existence. When introduced by "calling" I am more often introduced as a philosopher, rather than as a physicist (musician sneaks in there a lot too).

I generally deny the claim though.

Certainly the philosophies spawned science (which is why science degrees are still degrees in philosophy), but there is a descernable dividing line between the sciences and the philosophies.

That dividing line can be summed up in one word:

"Proof."

Or disproof, as the case may be.

As a Zen Buddhist I "know" that the world we percieve with our senses is one of illusion, that there is an underlying physics which may often be very different than what we think the world is like. As a physicist I can demonstrate this. What I "know" must give way to what I can demonstrate.

One will find the "missing link" in Descarte, widely held to be the founder of modern scientific thought, but whose arguments were still largely rooted in theology. To one not raised within the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition he can be rather tough sledding on this account.

There are certain fields beyond the pale of science, where philosophy still rules the roost, where only it has "answers", but those answers cannot be proven or disproven. They are held by belief and "faith."

Thus the answers philosophy provides are the basis for interminable argument without resolve, and often bloodshed.

Science cannot resolve the question, "What is the best way for us to live?," although much to its disgrace it often pretends that it can (it can certainly quantify and predict certain aspects of how we live, which is a useful thing to do, but it cannot scientifically define "best").

I would suggest that there is, philosophically speaking, no particular reason why we should exist at all, and the question of such isn't a scientific one. We do, or do not, exist.

Is happiness, perhaps, a measure of how we should live? The extreme behaviorists amoung us would deny that hapiness even exits. Yet I know that hapiness is at least a major factor to be considered. Philosophically. But I can't for the life of me tell you what hapiness is. Nor can I convince you of the Satori state, because I cannot demonstrate it, you must experience it yourself. . .

And even then it might be illusion.

It is meta-physical.

Thus it is argued about ad infinitum. Suzuki drives me to distraction sometimes. He should have talked less and meditated more, but he came from the academic philosophical tradition of Buddhism.

Thus arguing the unprovable, while it has certain validity, and can even be instructional in one's youth, in the end amounts to little more than masturbation of the soul. It makes you feel good, but leads nowhere except feeling good (which in itself, granted, might, philosophically speaking, have some validity).

Bear in mind also that most of, if not all, the really deep questions (including those engendered by accelerating technolgy and industry) where argued nigh unto death many, many thousands of years ago. At some point it becomes like watching the same episode of Gilligan's Island over, and over and over again.

It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before. You suddenly realize that it's silly and trivial. Then you find out your parents had heard it all before long before you were born (this is always a revelation to youth, whose timeline innately begins with their own selfconciousness, thus the tendency to try to teach grandma how to suck eggs, and ultimately to Twain's observation about how much his father had learned in just a few short years).

So argue philosophy while you are young. It's a necessary part of the development process, like learning not to piss on your hands, and don't forget what you learned by it as most people seem to do.

But there really isn't any point in trying to teach pigs to sing. It wastes your time and only annoys the pigs.

KFG

What about GO?

[bluethundr]

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!

Screw chess. Play Go.

[Fished]

Chess is a game for people who don't know how to play Go.

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

The Nano-Hurdles We Now Jump

[radiumhahn]

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.

Limitations: Chess is a Closed System

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Limitations: Chess is a Closed System

[G4from128k]

Basically everything in life is just a series of much smaller problems, requiring a finite number of operations.

Well, no. Real world situations tend to have nasty nonlinear coupling -- you hit a decompostional limit that forces to either deal with the whole big system, make assumptions that discard parts of the problem, or use iterative approaches that may not converge. For example the N-body gravity problem cannot be accurately reduced to a set of 2-body problems. The fact that so many human decisions have unintended consequences also illustrates this fact well.

If we could teach computers the "basics", they should be able to handle any situation on their own.

Easier said than done. When I did work on sensor management, the decision making problems were often deeply intractable because of second-order uncertainties. Not only were we not sure whether we had detected or classified an object correctly, but we had no easy way for computing the probabilities of detection/classification because the sensor and environment were not well characterized and not immediately accessible to us. Although we could easily create decision trees for making decisions, we could not easily populate the model with accurate values for the probabilities of the branches.

Philosophy of Mind: Today's Source of AI Research

[IceAgeComing]

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.

Re:Sorry, bad URL

[geordieboy]

What I always found most intruiging about Go is the difficulty of initially grasping its rules, despite their beautiful simplicity. It was a while before I found a decent logically complete explanation of how the game works. I think it may be much harder computationally than chess due to its "topological" character - that is, to play well, one has to have an intuitive grasp of the way curves behave in the plane and so on, which is hard to give a computer but we are hard-wired with.

Why are these programs considered A.I.?

[skifreak87]

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).

Ah, The Obligatory Go-Chess Flamewar begins

[efuseekay]

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).

Re:Ah, The Obligatory Go-Chess Flamewar begins

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, most Western go players played chess first, then got bored of it. When you try go after that you really feel quite enchanted with it (at least after the "why am I losing?" wears off). The reaction after that is "man I wasted a lot of time playing chess - I'm going to tell everyone else to skip chess and play go so they can benefit from my experience". It's basically born-again mentality, well-meaning but a bit suffocating and annoying to those who don't share it. ;)

Philosophy 101?

[pVoid]

Wow, I was actually excited to read this article when I saw the title, but this guy is a disappointingly bad thinker:

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?