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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 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
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).
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.
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).
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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