Slashdot Mirror
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 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!
In other words, philosophy essentially is religious argument.
Thus invoking religion in philosophical argument is like introducing Hitler when the subject is Nazis.
KFG
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.
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.
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.
It's still the way you read it. Go is much more complex. I recall reading a very interesting article about it at Wikipedia, which touches briefly on the comparison with chess and computer Go.
The revolution will not be televised.
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.
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.
I'm just getting into the game, and haven't even played against humans much. I must say it gets my interests more than chess. I have to ask, has the same amount of resources been put into creating a Go program as there has into Deep Blue?
I don't know. From what I understand the Japanese have been working on it for years, but how does it compare to the effort to create a master challenging chess program?
I can see how making a Go program would be more difficult. In Chess you move pieces, and there are significant limits on how you can move those pieces. Whereas in Go the pieces stay put, but you can put a new piece almost anywhere on the entire board, which usually has much more than 64 squares.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
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.
Not necessarily. The greatest engineering breakthroughs maybe. But not the greatest intellectual breakthroughs.
Look at computer science for example. People never thought about the existance of a "general purpose computing machine" till Bertrand russell came by. Russell, a great philosopher posed this question (which can be simplified as):- "If I can represent formulae using abstract symbols and data using abstract symbols - can formulae work on formulae which work on data ?" - Presto ! there came an idea - there can be a formula (computer) which takes a formula (program) and apply it to a symbol (data). This was the motivation behind Church's lambda calculus and Turing's Turing machine. Once they came up with turing machines, it was just a question of time before someone built them. So you see my friend, Knowing that a thing exists requires a bit of philosophy. Actually finding it is simply an engineering effort.
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.
Are you saying the Goering was a queen? I was under the assumption that it was Hitler whom was descended from a long line of English Queens.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
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.
It is a closed system, but you can say the same thing about arithmetic and algebra. Well, Hilbert tried to say about as much and look where that got him...
It's interesting that the article mentions variations on the game. One could imagine some meta-language to describe the rules and then a meta-chess solver to validate games... Hmm, but then you couldn't really say everything you wanted to about the system. It would be, heh, Incomplete.
My suggestion: play against humans, much. Get an IGS (PandaNet), KGS and NNGS account, and use them all. They're free btw.
Playing against computers will teach you bad habits. GnuGO has painfully weird and awful style (no offence to the developers, it's a great accomplishment nonetheless, and they'd be the first to admit its shortcomings - some of them hang out on NNGS). Many Faces of Go is better, but it's still nothing like playing people. I currently still lose either way, of course, but I learn a lot more from the people. You get all sorts of interesting feedback and discussion from folks online (getting your games mailed to you complete with kibitzes from the viewing audience is particularly valuable - there are lots of free clients and game editors that can play them back).
At least. Chess is fundamentally an easier problem for a computer to attack (or, dare I say it, for a human). One thing people in the West aren't aware of is the amount of attention Go gets in Japan, China, and Korea. The entire international chess community really pales by comparison.
There's tons of discussion about this already on the net, so no need to belabour it here. But it is a qualitatively different game, as well as being quantitatively inaccessible to brute-force (as you allude).
What's amazing is that people can play it, and to the degree of skill that they do. When you start to get to the mid-low teens kyu level (in online terms), you begin to see what those professional players are really doing. I used to be a decent chess player, and I could understand what the pros were doing but it didn't inspire me. Top-level Go is awe-inspiring.
It's only boring if don't know how to play it!
The nuances of the game far exceed those of chess. Simple rules, but beauty galore. It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old.
How could it be boring?
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
I get the feeling that you have two or more contradictory ideas of what Philosophy is, if you think that Philosophy is both "endless soul-searching and argument over subtle nuance" and the cause for "The greatest breakthroughs in science"--
I think you've some good thoughts but it's rather confusing- what's the main point of your comment?
RD
unfortunately, no. people who "don't have time for" philosophy generally don't realize that philosophy covers a very broad spectrum, from how to live your life, to politics, to matters of science, to things like debating if reality even exists. It puts it all together and attempts to find some meaning from it all. There's such a broad spectrum and no one person, I don't think, can really study ALL of philosophy.
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
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.
Except that these new situations and different rules really don't change anything about the way you handle situations. Basically everything in life is just a series of much smaller problems, requiring a finite number of operations. You just have to make a bunch of smaller decisions to handle that one big "new" experience. If we could teach computers the "basics", they should be able to handle any situation on their own.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
It's only boring if don't know how to play it!
No, it can still be boring even if you do know how to play it, just like the Xanth novels can be unfunny even if you get all the puns. I'm not arguing that you are wrong to like Go (or even, God forbid, Xanth novels), just that your argument claiming that people who find Go boring must not "get it" is flawed.
It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old.
How could it be boring?
Because it doesn't simulate anything? I mean I'm not a huge chess fan myself, but at least I can see how that lead to the development of miniature warfare gaming, which in turn influenced many computer strategy games. With the exception of Othello, Go didn't really "go" anywhere.
Wonderful post; I really enjoyed it. It gives the impression that you've been on this earth for a long, long time, or at least that you've been blessed like few others are with ample time for contemplation.
I've come across several of the ideas you've mentioned before, the most central to my post being the idea that philosophy is the realm of non-provable theories. This is an idea I can hardly disagree with.
It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before.
This is true on the timescale of single lifetimes, but perhaps not true on the timescale of multiple human generations. I'm interested in the idea that the boundary between philosophy and other subjects (such as mathematics) is not a stationary one. It is a bit like the boundary between A.I. and the rest of computer science: at one time, a spell-checking text editor was considered A.I., as was a parser for a compiler. People viewed these programs as "intelligent". These programs are no longer considered anything but straightforward engineering topics today.
Here's my half-baked, just-hatched-today claim: theories do occasionally move from philosophy to science or other modes of logical thought, such as mathematics. It happens rarely but makes the seemingly endless hashing over of ideas never lose its excitement and potential for hard discovery. A theory can be said to move out of the realm of pure philosophy once someone finds a way to test it within the concrete universe. I think of physics, mathematics, and psychology as examples.
Psychology, in fact, is currently "in between" and could fall completely outside the realm of philosophy if we ever develop machines capable of capturing the full complexity of a brain state.
Given our limited understanding of the universe, it's no surprise that this happens once every millenium or so.
I'd very much enjoy your reactions to this idea.
Easier said than done.
I certinaly didn't want to make it sound easy. That is why I said _if_ we could teach computers the basics. Obviously discovering just what the "basics" are and getting a computer to work by those rules would be very difficult, but ultimatly I'd think it would work.
As for the problem of decompositional limits, making assumptions, etc... This is what humans do all the time. We break things down until we can understand. If we can't break it down enough we make (sometimes radical) assumptions (God, anyone?). Humans also don't have the ability to correctly classify everything our sensors feed us, with absolut certainty. Yet will still manage to make decisions based on what we have available. I see no reason a computer couldn't do the same. Just because its sensors will never have certain inputs and just because a problem sometimes can't be figured to its smallest parts doesn't mean the computer system would simply have to stop.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
Curse my karma.. :(
;-P
Wow, I'm having a hard time determining if this parent post is sarcastic or not. Uh.. No, it's not flawed. Knowing the rules of the game != knowing how to play. I would say that 'getting it' and 'knowing how to play' would be an equivalent statement. This would apply for any form of entertainment, be it soccer, sex, or quake. So I'll have to disagree with your statement.
Because it doesn't simulate anything? I mean I'm not a huge chess fan myself, but at least I can see how that lead to the development of miniature warfare gaming, which in turn influenced many computer strategy games. With the exception of Othello, Go didn't really "go" anywhere.
I'm really hoping you were being sarcastic. How about the simulation of "be the guy with the most stuff?" Go is about possession of territory. How could this NOT lead to warfare? Or strategy? I would say that this is a very fundamental aspect of human nature, no?
Oh how wonderful it must be to be in bliss
\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
Another poster noted that there are two different senses of the word "exist" floating around here.
Exist(1) would mean something like "to have material extent", assuming that those words could be sufficiently defined. In that sense, particles "exist".
Exist(2) would mean -- to a Platonist -- "to be a form", which might or might not involve material extent; Plato was fuzzy on that point.
The problem is now to define precisely what it means to be a form. We certainly use forms in our thoughts all the time; you no doubt discussed triangles and circles in geometry, even though no-one ever actually drew one in class. Some would claim that Plato's 'forms' are simply reflections of universal human thought, while others -- Platonists -- would claim that Plato's forms are part of the underlying abstract structure of the universe.
So: Would Pi be Pi if no human ever thought of circles, or if mathematics had developed with a radically different set of axioms? Those who say Yes would deny Platonism; those who say No would be open to Platonism.
The prize of all this discussion is not simply mental mind-blowing, as other posters have suggested. Instead, it is getting at an important question: if we find other intelligence (in this case, computers, assuming that AI is or will be in fact 'intelligent'), will it necessarily be like ours? That is, will other intelligence be intelligible to us? Platonists will say Yes; others will be open to No.
A second prize would be, is there a correct mathematics, one which accurately maps to the abstract structure of the universe? Non-Platonist scientists would say that we simply create models for ourselves. Platonist scientists would say that there are underlying abstract relationships that drive physics, and those relationships can be captured by math.
Topic shift: a third prize is not a position on religion. Some religions are Platonic in flavor, while others are not. Christianity flirted with Platonism in the time of Origen, but has since mostly rejected it.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
But on this Go v. Chess topic, let me add that I read an article a while back (don't have the URL, sorry, may have even been a print article) that examined stroke victims. Strong Go players who suffered brain damage to one of their hemispheres but not the other would play a worse game, but the nature of the loss of playing skill would be very different depending on whether the stroke hit the one half of the brain than the other; one side (don't remember whether left or right) would lose their tactical/fighting ability in the game, the other side would lose their ability to work with large abstract territories. The article pointed out that chess players would lose basically all their chess ability when the damage was to one side of the brain (the one that matched tactics in go), and would lose very little ability when they suffered damage to the other side.
Anyway, it indicates that one of the ways that go is very different from chess is that it needs skills associated with the abstract/intuitive side of your brain and skills associated with the logical part of your brain, while chess needs primarily skills associated with the logical part. Perhaps this is why some people prefer one game over the other? If you love chess for its tactical reading, then you might not care for the abstract parts of go, which you would find boring. Meanwhile, a player who enjoys all of the game of go might find chess interesting but "lacking something."
Anyway, I'm not going to argue which game is better, just play what you like and let other people play what they like, no need to criticize either group.