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Deep Blue vs. Kasparov 10th Anniversary
qeorqe writes "For the tenth anniversary of Deep Blue's victory over the world chess champion Garry Kasparov,
Wired has an interview with Deep Blue developer Murray Cambell. The discuss the power of the now-aging supercomputer (equivalent to just one Cell processor), and the nonexistent future of PC vs. Human chess contests. 'It's almost the end of the story for chess in the sense that matches between chess machines and grand masters are becoming less interesting because it's so difficult for the human grand masters to compete successfully. They're even taking relatively dramatic steps like giving handicaps to computers, making them play the game with a pawn less or playing the game with less time. We're past the stage where there's a debate about who's better -- machines or grand masters -- and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.'"
A quick note for anyone interested in this sort of thing who hsn't already run across it: there is a great documentary on the Kasparov/Deep Blue contest called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. Well worth checking out.
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Indeed Go is a much bigger challenge. At the moment the best Go playing programs are about 8 Kyu. Which means that they are just childplay for any professional player (in Japan, China, South Korea). Even at the club where I play, half of the players beat these kind of programs with ease.
About soft AI, sure. All kinds of great things about tree pruning and state evaluation and stuff like that.
No hard AI stuff, but that's because in order to have a hard AI chess machine, you'd have to make the AI then teach it chess. Much more practical to go for the direct approach.
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Computers are so good at chess now that it's embarrassing. Unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life, any of the good PC chess programs can trounce you. Fritz at €119.90, runs on single or multiprocessor PCs, is rated at FIDE 2808 or so, and wins against Kasparov about half the time. If you're not a rated player, the chess programs for cell phones can beat you.
One of the experts in computer chess explained what's happened. Study of human grandmaster games indicates that about one move in ten is suboptimal, even at that level. That's enough to give computers that don't make mistakes a significant edge.
Computers are now so far ahead that there's a serious problem with cheating using a computer in chess competition, Several cheaters were caught at the 2006 World Open. "Two players are under suspicion of having received help from computers at the World Open in Philadelphia. One locked himself in a bathroom stall, the other, who was leading the event before the last round and stood to win $18,000, was caught wearing a "hearing aid" which turned out to be a wireless receiver used for surreptitious communications. The New York Times reports."
Chess players at major tournaments are now being searched.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Engines_Grand_T ournament
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The amazing thing is that the computers only beat humans by looking at every single possibility. I think Deep Blue processed something like 200 million chess positions a second. But human grandmasters usually only consider 3 or 4 moves during their typical two-minutes of thinking.
It only seems like grandmasters are only considering 3 or 4 moves. What you're missing is the fact that they can, at a glance, take in the current state of the game and instantly dismiss several million avenues of consideration based on past analysis and current variations.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
From what I hear (and this is just word of mouth and wikipedia) they suck at it because, like human players, they rely on "opening book".
This might just be my imagination but I think I do better when I play against GNUchess when we play Fischer Random. Its the future of chess IMHO.