Linux Chess Supercomputer Overpowers Grandmaster

Capt Bubudiu writes "Deep Blue vs. Kasparov is something most readers will remember but when Deep Blue was retired by IBM, a Dubai company took over with Hydra. In a $150,000 6-game challenge in Wembley UK, the games got off to a humiliation for mankind as Michael Adams, the UK Grandmaster, was mauled in games one and three, drawing game two. Adams is ranked seventh in the world and what ordinary mortals call a 'Super Grandmaster'."

Comments

Re:"we" won?

[ottffssent]

The computers are not beating the humans with math. They are not relying on superior computational capability. The computers are winning with superior algorithms. Even a fairly shallow complete traversal of the search space is many orders of magnitude away from being possible, and a machine using this approach will be consistently beaten by even middling players. Computer chess has advanced primarily due to algorithmic optimizations. The evaluation functions that a modern chess engine uses are extremely well-tuned, and while a chess engine may be backed by an enormous pre-computed opening book, this too is dependent on algorithmic advances, because the book is calculated using algorithms as well, not a brute-force search. The two sets of algorithms are different, and the opening book can benefit from hugely greater computational resources, but ultimately the search algorithm is the limiting factor.

In short, the recent successes of machine chess are due to human enginuity, to the same sort of creative processes that humans themselves use to play chess. Technology, in the machine sense, is almost irrelevant (see Fritz's victories on a dinky 8P Xeon with a few gig of RAM) when compared to the advances in understanding of the game of chess.

Interestingly, even as the programmers are developing an ever-greater understanding of chess, chess players are developing an ever-greater understanding of both the game and the way in which computers play it, though people with much greater understanding of this than I tell me that the newest algorithms are playing a very human-like game, minimizing the effect of understanding 'computer chess' on the game.