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.'"

Comments

fischer random chess

[mo]

Can anyone comment at how well chess apps like Junior or Fritz are at playing grand masters at Fischer Random Chess?

How can it be made fairer?

[Timesprout]

Chess is a zero sum perfect information game. Even a sufficently powerful computer with non optimal programming will at worst now hold its own with the best humans. Time to look for a different game. I believe decently talented players can still beat the best computer Go programs because although similar to chess the game strategy is more complex. When the computer programs eventually starts winning at Go, and win they will, I suggest kick boxing as the next challenge.

Re:Even the odds!

[HTH NE1]

How about computer vs. computer matches, let the better algorithm win, best time out of 1025 games?

Actually no

[aquila78]

This takes a lot more than brute-forcing. I think that the reason computers play chess so well more likely good search algorithms. According to the article, deep-blue is able to computer about 200,000,000 moves per second. If the strategy was a depth-first search of the state-space of chess (which have an average branching factor of 35) and all moves were considered, then deep-blue would only think about 5-6 moves ahead. I think Kasparov can do a bit better than that. However, not all moves are considered. A lot of intelligent pruning techniques can be applied in chess. Apart from that, I would assume that deep-blue also has quite a bit of storage capacity, so it could cache previous searches.

Respect to Kasparov though

[Timesprout]

I think it was the BBC a few years ago recorded a game between him and Nigel Short and intercut it with interviews of what they were thinking about the state of the game as it evolved. Kasparov was massively impressive with the sheer speed and coherence of his though and to me as a non chess player his almost psychic understanding of what Short was thinking was just amazing. Short after thinking he was winning and then realising what had just happen when Kasparov creamed him in a trap was classic.

Re:How about a power and mass handicap?

[SystemFault]

Among other things, it would force programmers to do more with less -- always a valid engineering goal. It's one thing to build a chessplayer that needs multiple racks and a three phase 220 V power supply, and a much more impressive thing for a chessplayer running on a hand powered OLPC laptop.

Weird!

[localman]

This morning I was reading a different Slashdot article and came across this comment, which led me to Wikipedia and in turn:

• Robert Heinlein
  
• Alfred Korzybski
  
• General Semantics
  
• Aristotlian Logic
  
• Martin Gardner
  
• Mathematical Games
  
• Soma Cube
  
• Pentomino
  
• Solved Games
  
• Endgame Tablebase
  
• Computer Chess
  
• Kasprov and this famous matchup
  

Then I come back here and find this article. I don't know what my point is but I just love the semi-random nature of brain feeding on the internet. For more information:

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

An xkcd comic.

Cheers.

Scientific American in 1992

[HockeyPuck]

There was an article in Scientific American magazine circa 1992 that predicted that at some point a computer would have enough power to have every possible move stored up, and upon starting the game it would have immediately announed "Mate in X moves." As you continued to play, it would eliminate millions of games, while still counting down "Mate in X-1 moves.."

Almost all chess programs now have an "opening library" of opening move strategies, so it's not that far to extend that library to 10-15-20-50-100 moves...