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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.
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First move!
I dont get it. Why is it so amazing that computers beat human beings in chess? Isnt chess all about logic and calculation? Arent computers all about logic and calculation?
If both are true, then how come it is so amazing that a computer beat a human being in chess?
Wouldnt it be more amazing if a human being beat a chess computer?
Is it possible that a computer could compute every possible move, make a database of it, and win automatically every time?
No one cares and or has any mod points today :)
... 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.
In 50 years will chess club be dominated by nerds who know how to build computers and write software or by the humans who take the time to learn the game? Society is becoming more and more oriented towards computers and I wouldnt be surprised if in the future people judge their skill based on who can write a better program for their computer, rather than knowing how to play the game itself. It's just too bad these computers don't give lessons.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If a computer could do it 8 years ago, then with Moore's law, this is 1/(2^5) as interesting as it was then. Did it quickly by hand.
Thank goodness I'm a Vulcan!
Read about how chess computers work. There are 10^120 possible moves for a certain "tree" sequence of moves. Today's chess computers evaluate millions of moves per second, far short of all possible moves, due to computing limitations.
It's interesting to note that both grandmasters and amateurs have been shown to think only 3-5 moves in the future, while computers calculate for 10-20. Despite that, humans are still competitive with computers in chess (losing some games, winning others), showing there's more to the game than how far one can predict. Those 3-5 predictions of a grandmaster will differ from those of the amateur, and those 10-20 of the computer.
Computers can also multiply hundred-digit integers faster than humans.
I'd like to see a computer beat the best Go players. Or how about a computer that can beat the best human chess players at Fischerandom chess
Why even mention the Operating System in something like this? It's pretty much irrelevant what operating system you're using, in fact you could probably spend two days or so converting the program to run without any operating system at all.
Actually, the time to get scared is when a chess computer becomes sentient, creates an army of robots and enslaves the organic world. Our only hope then will be the chess grandmasters, academic athletes turned heroes of mankind.
I bet I can beat every supercomputer on Earth.. If you just allow me to pull the plug ;)
... as the web site crawls to a halt.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I'm still waiting for the day where a supercomputer can win a rap battle against a human...
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Phew, for a minute then I thought the machines had risen and were exterminating mankind.
You see, for some people we don't just not RTFA, but we also don't RTF subject.
Often i'll not even read the title and just imagine up my own interesting news for nerds.
Like:
Monkeys become sentient and megalomaniacal. Invades Sweden for no apparent reason.
RIAA sues *insert file sharing company here* the *insert organisation name* is outraged, *insert frail child or elderly person* shocked.
It can be interesting to see a championship of computers vs. computers, with similar technology but different programming.
To watch a computer defeating a man playing chess is not even interesting anymore, is like trying to do multiplications faster than a calculator (I know some people claim that).
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.
Regardless of which operating system was used in this chess match, the sole determining factor is the hardware. Remember that Deep Blue defeated Kasparov with the more aesthetic MacOS, even though Kasparov is a more respected member of the chess community.
Linux zealots will cling to this "small victory", but software is only a means to an end.
The hardware and software engineers who built and programmed that computer were the ones who achieved the victory - the computer has no understanding of chess, nor in fact any capacity of understanding.
Now if they designed a general purpose AI that then learned to play chess and trounced a great-grand master (or whatever they are called), that would be a computer defeating a human.
sic transit gloria mundi
I could beat the computer in a boxing match.
Anyways, everybody knows a pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of brains.
How does the human rate on performance/Watt compared to the machine? Isn't that what's important these days?
So what. Chess is so one-diminsional. I wonder how good that machine would do at a real skill game, like Rock, Paper, Scissors.
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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
You can watch the current game live on fics (free internet chess server). It is interesting to see how Adams has adapted his strategy thoughout this series. This game, it appears (I'm not a grand master so take this with a grain of salt) that Adams traded agressively to shorten the game. At the time of this post, Adams was down a pawn (1 rook and 3 pawns to 1 rook and 2 pawns). It also appears that Adams should be able to even the material in the next couple of moves even though Adams is currently in check. Anyway, log on to www.freechess.org and ob 37 if you want to watch.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Chess stopped being for humans a long, long time ago. Ditch chess and start playing Go. It's true that computers will probably master that as well, but that day is still quite a ways off. The history of Go is filled with great achievements...
Does being good at chess correlate to anything else? Does chess score indicate IQ? Does chess scores indicate earning power? Anyone have a t-shirt that says "I play chess... Love me before I become rich"?
There is a definite correlation between skill at chess and interest in playing chess. That's pretty much it.
Conan O'Brien's Head: Yeah, well at least I have something you'll never have! A soul!
Bender: Big deal!
Conan O'Brien's Head: And freckles!
Bender: (crying) Whaa...ha..ha...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While the search space may branch more quickly in Go, relative to chess, this is not the primary source of the difficulty of Go. The primary reason why Go is hard is that the results of any move are not fully apparent until the distant future.
A blunder in chess will typically result in a loss of material or a significant measurable disadvantage within five moves or less, and often on the very next move. A blunder in Go may only become apparent forty moves later. Forty moves is well beyond the limits of current technology.
A possible side effect of this (just conjecture), is that it is also much harder to measure the effects of sacrificial moves in Go.
Seeing so many posts describing this as a "man versus machine" thing compels me to mention advanced chess, a new form of chess recently proposed by Garry Kasparov. The gist of it is that instead of humans and computers working either alone or against each other, a human player and a computer player team up. Personally, I think competitions like that are great for exploring how humans and computers can achieve a better symbiosis with each other, taking advantage of the strengths of each.
From wikipedia:
Advanced Chess is a relatively new form of chess, first introduced by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, with the objective of a human player and a computer chess program joining forces and competing as a team against other such pairs. Many Advanced Chess proponents have stressed that Advanced Chess has merits in:
* increasing the level of play to heights never before seen in chess;
* producing blunder-free games with the qualities and the beauty of both perfect tactical play and highly meaningful strategic plans;
* giving the viewing audience a remarkable insight into the thought processes of strong human chess players and strong chess computers, and the combination thereof.