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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.'"
How about we play overnight on January 19, 2038? I'll use this mechanical chess clock to keep track of my times, and Deep Blue can use those two 32-bit integers holding time_t, and subtract one from the other!
Can anyone comment at how well chess apps like Junior or Fritz are at playing grand masters at Fischer Random Chess?
and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.
Make them play go.
Direct away from face when opening.
We knew this was coming.
However, there are still many games that computers are a long way away from beating skilled human opponents.
Poker
Go
Rock Paper Scissors
Mixed Martial Arts
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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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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.
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.
My computer posting program made that post after considering all available posts and outcomes of those posts and then determining the optimal post to elicit a response from a twat.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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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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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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.
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.
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:
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An xkcd comic.
Cheers.
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...