Can a Bayesian Spam Filter Play Chess?

martin-boundary writes "The typical Bayesian spam filters learn to distinguish ham from spam just by reading thousands of emails, but is this all they can do? This essay shows step by step how to teach a Bayesian filter to play chess against a human, on Linux, with XBoard."

Comments

No, it can't (well)

[Flyboy Connor]

It's a fun article (if you are interested in these things, that is). However, the premise is all wrong, and that is why spam-chess fails:

The premise of a Bayesian filter is that is learns sequences of words, or characters, or whatever. Spam-chess learns sequences of moves. This premise is wrong, since good moves are related to complete board positions, not to what was done in the previous few moves.

Of course, the longer your string of moves is, the better it will represent the board position, especially during the opening phase of the game. And the example the article provides of reasonable play of spam-chess, is actually from the game's opening, where the learned sequences indeed represent the complete game.

For the middle game, however, spam chess will perform badly, always.

But, as I said before, the idea is quite a lot of fun. I enjoyed reading the article. You can learn a lot from it, both about spam filtering and about chess.