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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'."
The interesting thing is that in a man vs. machine fight, the tech folks can say "we won" as they assembled the machine. Is it a humiliation or triumph for mankind that it can build a machine that can defeat itself? I think it would rather be a failure for humans if mortals can defeat highly optimized machines.
see a Text Widget
... that computers will beat a man at chess all the time they are allowed to use a database on positions.
The time to get scared is when a 'thinking' computer chess program does it all for scratch from the first move.
Having said that, GNUChess 0wn35 me bigtime, the bugger.
Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.
I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:
Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:
The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.
The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.
Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:
Kolmogorov Complexity
Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.
Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:
Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.
In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.
The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.
Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.
Seastead this.
Or a really powerfull magnet.
But then again, I could put some CN in anyones food and have the same effect.
The differance between a person and a computer is people can learn. A computer can not. I played chess for many years, and I did not get better by reading books or studying past games. I got better by playing.
Chess can never be reduced to a number of possible moves just like art can never be reduced to a number of strokes. God gave us something which seperates us from all other things on earth. We are unlike anything else.
If all a computer can be is logic, I wonder if anyone has found a way to force a shutdown loop, to do something so illogical the computer can not continue.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I rarely post, but I thought this might be worth reminding people of.
While computers are easily tactical masters of chess playing - in that they can immediately anaylze all possible moves availible in a given play, and determine possible outcomes, their fallacy comes in strategy, because, put simply, they don't know how to win.
What is a good move? Is it one that results in a opposing piece's defeat? If so - what value should that piece be assigned? Indeed, what is the value of _any_ piece at any given time on the boards - why should a machine choose one set of perfect moves over another - in almost every way a computer cannot determine the long term value of a move.
This is remedied somewhat by having pre-played game analysis at the disposal of the machine, but in almost every case the computer program requires serious recalibration between matches to prevent a human player from adapting to a strong tactical game. It is by no stretch that computers can be considered inferior in almost every way to a strong human player.
Kasparov posited Advanced Chess as the ultimate play form; the tactical mastery of a computer, mixed with the multilevel strategy of a grandmaster player, making for a game of sublime subtley and perfection.
The two Hydra machines did not even make it into the final sixteen. Moreover, the eventual winners were a couple of amateurs using pretty ordinary PCs running over-the-counter chess programs. On the way to the title they beat a selection of computer- and supergrandmaster-assisted grandmasters.
On this evidence the "strongest chess entity on the planet" is a team consisting of a New Hampshire database administrator + a soccer coach + 3 ordinary PCs.
Links:
Hydra knocked out
Final result
Winners debriefing