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."
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.