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10 Years After Big Blue Beat Garry Kasparov
Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.
It stays relatively cool under pressure.
Problem is, it heats up under load.
Here's a direct link without the ad: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19179/?a= f
I'll bet Big Blue has one hell of a poker face!
The game.
But what about 'Go'? 'Go' is much harder for computers to play. Let's all talk about 'Go'.
Offtopic, but I really like these '10 years after' articles, because it helps me sit back and think about the last decade. I was thinking this had been more recent, didn't realize an entire decade has passed... Kinda fun to actually think about what all has changed, and what hasn't.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
I thought I'd save y'all some time and some page views. The following summarizes everything you will take away from the article:
"10 years ago Kasparov was beaten by a computer. The computer used a brute force searching method that pruned a lot of move trees. How do you know Kasparov's brain didn't do the same thing? The only clear difference is that humans can be intimidated, but that's not to humans' credit. Oh, and Fisher Random chess is designed to force more computational power to be used during the game rather than before."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
People seem to be very sensitive about computers doing things they think only humans should be able to do. They dismiss defeating a chess grand master or the Turing Test as toy problems.
I did an AI degree in the mid 90s and one of the things we covered was the definition of intelligence. After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else...
Actually, my favourite definition of intelligence, partly because of its succinctness, is "productive laziness".
Peter
From the article, "Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be--forever--beyond the reach of any computer."
Oh, please. The hubris is overwhelming.
I play the game. I am not a great players, but it is a fun diversion and can help to develop focus and thinking skills. But, please, to say that Chess could have been beyond a computer? That is small, ignorant thinking.
The human brain excels at pattern matching in massive parallelism. It is this advantage we have over our current computers. But, new computer designs have gotten fast and with lotsa memory and storage space. It was only a matter of time until a computer had the right amounts of that speed, memory and storage space, coupled with programmers to make the best use of it and then no human would ever stand a chance.
As we get better with fuzzy AI type stuff, even games like Poker, Texas Hold 'em and others will even fall from our human hands.
The intuition we exercise is some random choice being made, but based on experience and a factor of acceptable risk of failure.
Bearded Dragon
Later. Later. Right now, let's play Global Thermonuclear War.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Garry Kasparov ego probably caused him to loose more then his brain power or his chess skills. Having a computer give him an extreamly challanging game got him fustrated thus making mistakes.
The Computer doesn't care it is just focusing on the game 100% it is not even conserned if it is breathing or not overheating or a person behind it with a gun to shoot it if it looses. It is just running a set of processes, and using its memory to play the game.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While it was impressive to have a computer win against the "chess master" it accomplished this task by looking ahead as many board configurations as possible based on the current board and the probability its opponent would make certain moves. This is a stategy no human could ever employ due to the sheer processing power it requires to run all the permutation calculations. I believe a system capable of actually "learning", like a trained neural network, would be a fair match for the human brain. As it stands there is no real intelligence being used.
After it was discovered that IBM was tinkering using chess experts (that is, humans) to tinker with its software between matches, they're personae non gratae in the chess world now.
Back in the early 1990s, I used to play in chess tournaments. I wasn't very good though and I didn't play at a high level, but I did play in official tournaments that the USCF (United States Chess Federation) sanctioned. My goal at the time was to try to make grand master. I gave up because of 2 reasons. The first was that I wasn't very good. I had serious problems in the middle game. My opening play and end game play were sound, but inevitably I would get beat in the middle game through carelessness. The second reason I gave up was because I realized that computers were ruining chess. Keep in mind that I am talking 1990-1993 here (I stopped playing in tournaments in 1993). In the old days, if you learned a chess opening, the moves might go 7 moves deep or so in most openings where the moves for the white and black pieces were known and any deviations from these set moves got you "out of book" as they say. If you deviated on, say, move 4 in a 7 move sequence, the odds were that your move was bad because if it was so good, it would have been known and used by other players and then be part of the book. At this time being "in book" was already starting to change because of computer analysis. Then you could go 10 moves or more in many openings and still be "in book". The amount of time and memory required to memorize these much deeper opening sequences was overwhelming. One day I realized that it just wasn't worth it and I'd rather devote my time and brain power to other things that I actually had some talent for, like learning other languages.
Chess is said to be "solvable". My understanding is that it can be proven mathematically that chess has a finite series of moves. If this is correct, then at some point computers will be powerful enough to be able win every game because they'll be able to analyze every possible opening all the way to the end and only pick the moves that will win. No human will ever be able to duplicate this feat. So it is inevitable that computers will eventually be unbeatable. I think just a few weeks ago Slashdot had an article that a computer program has been designed that is now at the point where it cannot lose at checkers - ever. Checkers is quite a bit less complex than chess and it has only now been solved. Whether it takes 10, 20, 50 or more years to solve chess, the day will come when computers simply cannot be beaten at chess under the current rules.
Should we care? Well, maybe not. Computers are better than humans at a lot of things, like mathematical calculations, so it's inevitable that they will be better than humans at chess. The downside is that once all chess games are solvable, it will ruin chess at the professional level. It will make it almost impossible for any game to be postponed until the next day because once there is a postponement, a player could, in theory, simply use a PC to analyze his game and find a sequence of moves where he cannot lose if he plays them correctly. At that point, there's no more human element in the game - it's simply a matter who can more accurately remember computer analysis. Computers ruined chess for me in the early 1990s. Can you imagine how much worse things are now? And how much worse they will be when the day comes that everybody can use a PC to analyze his game and find a way to never lose? At that point, I suspect that either chess will change to Fischer Random Chess as mentioned in the article or people who would have played chess will simply move on and play the game of go instead. Go is beyond the ability of current computers to solve and even the best computer programs can't beat strong human players.
I do not understand why some people compare Chess with games like taxes hold em or poker in general. What people seem to miss in my opinion is that unlike Chess which can be purely calculated, poker besides skill is also based on luck. Since a computer cannot bluff and does not have a pokerface or emotions for that matter, it does not rely on skill but on calculations. Which person has what cards, how big is the chance they have this and this card. The computer can than calculate his chances. However if the pc has bad luck it simply wont win every time. Thus the computer will never be albe to beat humans at poker ever single time simply because sometimes a human will get better cards and eventually win the game.
So in my opinion, no, computers will never beat humans at poker because chance cannot be calculated.
Chess is a bad example of what makes us different from computers. It's a game of brute force search, something that computers are good at, and we suck at. Just like Google is better at finding things on the internet than we are, computers are better at playing chess.
At each step in a game of chess, there is a finite, pre defined set of legal moves. You have up to 16 pieces you can move, and depending on their position, each piece has a number of pre-defined legal moves. As you try to look forward, the number of possible moves increases exponentially, but no matter how far forward you look, there is still a finite number of pre-defined legal moves.
No room for creativity at all. And that's where our difference comes in.
Computers are excellent at searching through a finite space of pre-defined values, which we in general suck at. On the other hand, we are excellent at coming up with creative solutions, where as the computer sucks at this (or rather, is completely unable to). That's why once the computer becomes fast enough, the computer will always win. Always. We are not there yet, but the computer is already winning most of the time.
What we are seeing in a match between Deep Blue and Kasparov is NOT a computer doing what humans are good at. It's a human doing what computers are good at. Kasparov has played for years to get as good as searching through a finite space of pre-defined values, where as computers have been doing this since day one. For the computer, the only difference is speed. For us, taking a mediocre player, and making him a million times faster is not going to make him play better. He'll just get beaten a million times faster.
Playing games like Chess (or even Go) is not the way to prove that we are more intelligent than computers. However, either game can be used to do exactly this. How? Not by playing...
Who came up with Chess?
When is the last time the computer came up with a game on it's own?
"...even games like Poker, Texas Hold 'em and others will even fall from our human hands."
Hardly. There is one overriding feature of these games that differentiates them from more structured games: luck and randomness.
The idea that the game is "within" our hands is negated by the fact that there is an entire industry of separating people from their money built upon the simple fact that it largely comes down to luck. The general rule is that because of the constructs of the game you will lose more often than you will win; there are exceptions to this rule and people can mitigate the randomness to some degree, but the rule still stands.
Can someone explain to me what the difficulty in creating a computer chess master? Wouldn't it just be to create a function that outputs the move that provides the most possible ways of winning, then repeat that function until check mate? Obviously not. But why? I suck at chess.
Don't be crazy anymore!
I love backgammon and can see only one major flaw with playing against a computer... it has no money for me to take!
But (back on topic) - it could be said that backgammon, whilst maybe not deterministic (real world randomness), is not non-deterministic, at least as far as the creation of a game tree. I've no idea if I'm barking up the wrong tree but it seems that the decision tree of Backgammon must incorporate all (21?) possible die combos. Although the results of the dice are random there is (thanfully) still a finite number of possibilites.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I seem to recall that Kasparov conceded the game. While still technically a win for Big Blue, is this not somewhat different than an actual checkmate? Was a checkmate imminent?
...then you also saw Kasparov quit after what he calls the "incident" and whine like a petulant 12 year old when his "ego" took a beating. "How dare it not take my pawn sacrifice! No one can beat me! Let me see the source! Waa!" Let's think about that for a minute, if he were playing another person would he ask them about their strategy between matches?
One has find it hard to believe that someone supposedly so "intelligent" couldn't fathom the premise that IBM may have had other motives going into the match to begin with.
In case anyone is confused by the title/summary: Big Blue = IBM; Deep Blue = The Chess Playing Computer.
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
It was an interesting time. But it just upped the bets. Know it's who can be the first to beat a Go dan level player.
An interesting observation on the current crop of top PC chess programs. Rybka, the program that tops all the ranking lists, does so with a node count that is much lower. That is, Rybka looks at around a tenth of the number of positions per second compared to other programs. The reason is does so well, is that it has a very sophisticated evaluation algorithm for each position it examines. In some sense, it has better chess knowledge than other programs.
And this is the difference between Kasparov and Deep Blue (and other chess computers). The computer can analyse millions of positions per second. Kasparov might examine only a couple of positions per second, but he does so with far greater knowledge and insight - he recognizes when pieces are coordinated and mobile, when pawn structures are strong, when his king is safe.
One day far in the future, we will start up our chess programs and they will immediately announce "Mate in 326". A "good" move will be one that hastens the loss by as little as possible.
"Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence. However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies." -John McCarthy
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
People quickly forget (or delude themselves). Kasparov wasn't defeated by a machine, but by a team of experts using a machine. There's a huge difference.
Still, who cares? Chess is a solvable game, and brute force will eventually win. Not impressive at all, and there's nothing to do with intelligence.
I just returned home from the 2007 Scrabble Players Championship, which for this year was the largest North American tournament - substituting for the North American National Scrabble Championship which just returned to an even-year schedule from its brief flirtation with an annual schedule.
There are few in the Scrabble tournament field who think that humans have a chance against a well designed computer program. Sure, as the game contains a significant portion of chance, even an intermediate player like myself has occasionally beat the best computer programs. But given a statistically significant series of games, even the best players will lose to a computer program that was written in spare time by a bright MIT student running on a Pentium 2.
But this does not reduce the fun or competitiveness of the game as a Human endeavor. The value of competition is not in our superiority to computers, but rather that it pushes the limit of the Human mind. There is value in realizing that the human mind has finite limitations and knowing how to push it to them.
Scrabble requires players to memorize gigantic lists of words, index them in useful patterns, unscramble them under pressure of time, calculate probabilities, take risks.
Computers can be programmed to do almost all of the tasks a Scrabble player does, and much faster. But it just isn't all that amazing to watch a computer find a 14 letter bingo play that spans 7 disconnected tiles. Of course the computer found it. Watching a person find it is spectacular.
Chess may be a closer match for Human v Computer, but it still doesn't make the human competition any less spectacular.
I mean, with Moore's Law improving the computing power of PC's. PCs should be 32-64x more powerful than 10 yrs ago. How big is a machine that would have the equiv processing power of deep blue of 1997?
Computers are better at calculations than humans. More at 11.
I used to study AI for a while, and i just wanted to point out how unfair this line of reasoning is. Stuff like this ("Very nice, but it isn't *real* AI, because...") always comes up every time there's some AI break-though being discussed.
1. It's almost trivial to make a program 'learn' from mistakes. Just store some negative value for that specific decision-point. Depends on your definition of 'learning', of course. But the principle is the same in humans and AI
2. Kasparov also adjusted his style (i believe there are certain playing-styles that are beneficial when playing against an AI), and i bet he had coaches and consultants
3. So what?
4. See above.
My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is. I bet if you'd tell somebody 100 years ago that a machine would be the world's best chess player, that alone would have been enough to consider the machine 'intelligent of sorts'. But as soon as we know how it works, it somehow looses the right to be called 'intelligent' (mechanical turk). I think this is because it seems to hurt humans that AI shows them that whatever gives us the right to call ourselves 'intelligent' is nothing more than the result of zillions of relatively simple interactions of little protein-machines.
IIRC (its been a while) the best way to determine what language a given text is written in, is amazingly 'stupid': just compare the ratio of how many times the different characters appear. The result is still amazing and should be considered 'kind of intelligent'.
So, just give AI some kudos, accept that there's a lot left to be done, and that the heuristics dint really matter, as long as the result is cool. (and please dont give me none of that Chinese Room Argument crap)
I'll run for the hills once a computer can beat a professional boxer.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
I really hate it when people type "loose" instead of "lose" because they don't even sound the same.
A year or so ago, I saw a documentary about this. If I remember correctly, IBM has a grand master behind the scenes, working with the computer. This grand master also over-rode one or more moves made by Big Blue.
I didn't see that documentary. But it would not surprise me that a GM was sitting behind the scenes. It smelled fishy from the start.
Gnome project was started also exactly 10 years ago! Happy anniversary, guys!s t/msg00123.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/1997-Augu
... is Computer vs. Computer
They are fearless, uncompromising, untiring. The games are far more interesting than human efforts. Check out some Rybka vs. ZapZanzibar matches (the number 1 program vs. the number 2 program). Incredible play.
Kasparov is trying to become a next Russian president today. Let 10 years older and smarter Big Blue beat him in this too.
Can I use a machine gun?
Deep Blue analayzes millions of possible moves every second, resulting in a performance that eventually beat the best chess player there is. Yet grandmasters do not consider anywhere even close to this number of alternatives, and Kasparov did hold his own against the computer for more than one match. Why can humans so rapidly prune irrellevant combinations from consideration before evaluating them further and still present incredibly strong play? I believe that the answer to this question holds the key to making a computer that is actually good at chess. Deep Blue didn't beat Kasparov because it was better at chess than he was. It beat him because of the sheer overwhelming number of combinations that Deep Blue analayzed, which itself was only sufficient to beat the capabilities of considering the mere hundred or so moves at most that Kasparov would have likely considered each turn. Which is _really_ the better player?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because chess is a relatively simple game with limited possibilities, chess computers (programs) have been able to challenge most people for a while now, and -- ten years ago -- even give Kasparov a hard time. However, if you take a game like Go, which is many orders of magnitude more complex, it takes more imagination and intuition to win than just plain brute force. Even relatively weak Go players are still able to beat the best Go programs.
Its DEEP BLUE, not big blue!!!!!!!!!!!
Lot of comments about Poker vs Chess as to computational difficulty but the fundamental difference between these games has not been noted.
Theoretically, as has been pointed out, given a large enough storage one could have the optimal solution for any chess game stored away - that is there is a very 'dumb' way to play chess that is simply a consequence of the current state of any board. In a sense then the game is 'deterministic' such that the outcome can be completely determined by the way you play. In chess both players know the entire state of the game at all times.
Now the important difference with Poker is not the human elements of bluffing et al but the fact that there is hidden state - no player has a total view of the state of any hand of Poker. One might consider, for example, the difference in play one might expect to see if one did know the total state of the game (i.e. you could see all the cards). The interesting problem in Poker is that is is 'non-deterministic' such that the outcome cannot be completely determined by the way you play. In many instances you are at the mercy of the other player's and how they play.
Now philosophically both types of game cause problems for people. In the first instance it is always possible to get a win simply by 'dumbly' examining every possibility. In the second instance it is never possible to guarantee a win no matter how 'smart' you are. Neither type of game seems very satisfying from this perspective since what we want is a game where it is always possible to win as long as you are very 'smart' but not if you are 'dumb'. It seems like building such a game is impossible: 'dumb' can always achieve what 'smart' can do.
My definition of intelligent: an individual that knows the difference between lose and loose ;)
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Can we please stop calling it that? It's go. Just go. Not Go. Not "go". Not "Go". Yes, it's an English word, but in context it's about as confusing as chess v. chest. Thanks.
funny,i ran it thru a spell and grammer checker....
Was it Game Over? The IBM thing was an allegation, not a fact. Kasparov comes off as a sore-loser-egomaniac who lost the later games in the match because of a hissy-fit he had with the "incident". The last scenes in the movie we see him vainly trying to reclaim his "ego" by trouncing opponents in some tournaments. Comes off like an ex-NFL'er parading through the local flag-football league.
Being a computer chess enthusiest, I've known that computer as "Deep Blue", rather than "Big Blue", as it is commonly referred to. Also, the big deal wasn't beating a grandmaster (A feat accomplished prior to that point), it was beating a world champion.
Programming a computer that can beat a chess grandmaster is obviously not easy, but the fact that the computer won is about as enlightening as the realization that machines can lift more than the strongest man.
/. articles about the "Turing test", but I can't help responding to this one. There is no meaningful comparison between the achievements of this program and the cognitive capacities of human beings. I agree with Noam Chomsky on this issue; since I can't state it as eloquently or concisely as him, here's his take on the subject.
I'll reproduce a comment I made the last time an AI article surfaced:
I've held back from replying to the myriad of other
Some might call it a cop-out to just link to Chomsky, so I'll paste the most relevant section here:
There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
The problem here is that chess is just a puzzle to the computer. Human vs Machine in chess is not very interesting simply because it's a matter of can the human come up with moves that the computer didn't see by computing possibilities far enough into the future.
Human vs Human is interesting because of the emotional factor and other things that can affect human players. To a computer it is all just one big puzzle to methodically solve.
They say that when Deep Blue won game two it won the match. After game two Kasparov was on tilt (to use a poker term). So what happened?
Up until that time it was common knowledge that computers favored capturing pieces. One reason for this is that the computer can use brute force effectively when there are less pieces on the board. In general, computers play tactically rather than strategically. Computers perform best in open positions. A common strategy for playing against a computer is to strive for closed positions and strategic play. If you play sharp positions, like the Sicilian or the Ruy Lopez, then you are asking to get humiliated by the computer.
In game two Kasparov set a trap. He created a position where he would lose a pawn. However, to take his pawn meant creating a bad position for yourself. His loss of material would be compensated by better position. He expected the computer to take the pawn. Even chess experts kibitzing the game expected it. What did the computer do? It didn't take the pawn! Instead it played a positionally sound counter move. Kasparov was shocked, to the point he couldn't think straight anymore. He could have drawn the game but because his head was spinning he was not making the best moves and lost. Afterwards he would accuse the Deep Blue team of cheating. For Kasparov there was no other explanation. This was not the play of a computer but the play of a human grand master. Also, Kasparov won the first game against Deep Blue, and it was an easy victory. All of a sudden Deep Blue has improved dramatically overnight? Kasparov was also not allowed to see the logs from Deep Blue. Ultimately Kasparov never recovered from this game and did not play his best for the remainder of the match.
It is also interesting to note that a few years later Kasparov would play against Fritz 3D, which was supposed to be the best chess software to date. Although the match ended in a draw I think one game from the match is worthy of mention. In this game Kasparov completely locked up the position. Fritz 3D did not know what to do in such a tightly closed position. It ended up making what appeared to be random moves. Eventually the operators for Fritz 3D resigned the game as they knew Fritz 3D was in real trouble. Was it a bug in the code or was it out played by Kasparov? Either way it tells me that computers are not taking over the world any time soon.
The idea that chess is such a vaunted, emotionally-requiring game to play...it's only that way to US. It's a mental arm-wrestling with another human.
It is in NO way some milestone that says "Nope! Computers are now superior to humans- bow to our silicon-based masters." Think first.
Then go ask Big Blue to get you a Coke with a handful of change.
[No arms- no fingers- no programming to insert the coins if it had them- doesn't know how to ask someone for help]
It's not superior- it's just better at chess! Relax, MENSA- they're not coming for you anytime soon.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
IME people--especially technically trained--sometimes tend to scoff at that level of definition. But I think there is something to it--intelligence is a concept defined by intelligent beings (us), so why must we introduce the abstraction of a codified definition? You just run into the limits of language, which is itself a manifestation of what you're trying to define. I think it's better to just cut straight to the chase and ask one intelligence to identify another through direct observation and interaction.
That's the genius of the Turing Test, which I would not call a toy problem. I'm not an expert in the field, but I am interested, and have taken the time to interact with some of the more well-known chatbots like ALICE or George Jabberwocky. I feel like it's very easy to determine that I'm not talking to another human. For one thing the continual use of demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, etc) seems to show pretty quickly whether the other party is capable of carrying a "thread" of conversation, or just responding to each entry. For another, conversations about emotional content tend to lead to either reflexive questioning (other party restates each question a la therapy), changing the subject, or nonsense responses. Puns or double entendres are also good tests.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Every time I read an article in the MIT Technology Review, I have this horrible annoying dissatisfaction -- it is as though their articles are written by somebody that needs to fill 4000 words with something that he really doesn't understand. Sometimes their articles are filled with buzzwords (nanotechnology! bioinformatics! what about the philosophy of this new tech???), and just have ideas that are not developed or under referenced. Even the tone is way too immature to be taken seriously.
:p
Quotes like this:
>Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and
>reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are
>protein machines.
Is the idea of a brain as a protein machine ever subsequently discussed? The whole article is so scattered I find it difficult to follow any sort of thesis or actual information. I'm not trying to be overly critical, but *every* article in that rag is like that -- read a few issues and you will see exactly what I mean. He references the New York Times for opinions on human psychology, for instance.
For a *much* better read about the development of Deep Blue (and quite entertaining despite the subject matter) pick up a copy of "Behind Deep Blue" by Feng-Hsiung Hsu.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7342.html
This discusses in detail the choices the designers made regarding score weighting algorithms, and the various philosophies between a machine simply parsing all possible moves versus "thinking" what moves an opponent will make and the likely outcome of the current phase of the game. Excellent book for any nerd.
Yes, I went to MIT...
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Dennett's article suggest to me that he himself does not know a huge amount about chess. For instance, he writes, "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess..."
Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).
Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.
Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It will be hard for anyone to sustain when and if autonomous machines can form their own goals. Those goals will be different from ours, but they will be smarter than us and win.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
2. Kasparov also adjusted his style (i believe there are certain playing-styles that are beneficial when playing against an AI), and i bet he had coaches and consultants
3. So what?
Headline: "Computer beats Human at chess"
If human chess experts were in the background 'helping' the computer then that headline loses its meaning and credibility. It would then need to be:
Headline: "Humans with a Computer beat other Human at chess"
Not nearly so dramatic... *shrug*
"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic..." - Eric Hoffer
I don't see a chess playing computer as being remotely close to AI. Chess has a finite number of possible moves and scenarios. The faster a computer can churn through the possibilities and the more moves ahead it can look (deeper recursion) the better it will be. Eventually we will have a computer that can churn through every single possibility in real time. This proves nothing.
Now, lets look at a strategic scenario in the real world- like a field of battle. Here, not only are the possible moves and situations endless, humans will always be able to creatively invent something that the computer wasn't even considering, or even knew existed. For example, the computer is churning through possible moves of troops and allocations of weaponry and possible ways it could be attacked.... and then bam- the humans do something totally out there like digging a pit and covering it with leaves, and woops the computer didn't 'know' it was supposed to watch the ground for suspicious foliage.
Let's start dealing with this issue by having the computer and human play a game of chess where you can design your own pieces that have their own movement patterns that are not told to the competitor ahead of time. On a chess board that has no borders. That would be much more interesting. Maybe something like those table-top miniature games.
What Deep Blue proved at the time was that the state-of-the-art in massively parallel computation had advanced to the point where beating a Grand Master in chess became possible. Yet, not a flicker of intelligence was needed. Consider this: Deep Blue was able to evaluate 200 million positions per second, while Kasparov (by his own estimate) could only do about three. Yet, somehow, their playing performance was practically equal. That makes Kasparov about 66 million times smarter.
The amazing thing about human intelligence is that it is able to make sense of insanely complex situations with only a glance. The powers of abstraction, deductive and probabilistic reasoning, and what we simply call "intuition" (because we don't understand it) allow Kasparov to ignore 66 million possitions for every single one he looks at.
An even more important characteristic of human intelligence is that it's universal. A human may be beatable by computer at pretty much any given task in isolation, but even a child crushes a computer when it comes to overall performance. Deep Blue may play chess very well, but it doesn't recognize a smile, it cannot catch a ball, and it cannot tell if that cute little puppy is gonna bite its ass. That takes real intelligence.
Yes, we can build systems with almost unlimited raw power. But comparing the ability of a computer with human intelligence is like comparing a crane to the human hand.
Yes. The go proverb for this is "loose your first 100 games as quickly as possible". The hidden truth in that statement is that Go is a somewhat different game than most others. The pieces are stationary, and can't run away from danger. It takes some repetition to quickly perceive the way in which the continual addition of stationary stones can create the same effect with respect to a group of stones. In go you don't "run away", you "grow away" :).
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"what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master?"
It is not the _computer_ which beat a grand master, but rather accumulated know-how of many people in various disciplines (including chess, programming, hardware design), supported by the current level of material culture. One human lost to many other humans rather than to a single machine, and within unfair time limits: consider all the time it took to assemble, encode, and execute the knowledge that was brought to bear against the human player.
Consequently, the question is misleading, if not plain silly, even if asked ad nauseam.
One currently beyond our ability to solve in the general case, but a computation just like Tic-Tac-Toe or checkers, both of which have been solved.
Hello all:
Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov has been a significant boost of confidence to AI researchers. That said, I like to point out that the match is one that places a handicap on the human player. Why? Kasparov has to deal with life's problems as well, beside playing Chess. Given a set computational capability, the bigger the problem spaces, the slower the computational time. If Kasparov is modeled as an organic search engine, then the fact that it's in the same league as Deep Blue hints that Kasparov's computational capability is higher than Deep Blue, because his problem space would include such things as finding a job, finding shelter, finding food, etc. In short, Kasparov is a general intelligence machine, while Deep Blue is highly specialized one.
One advantage, I think, human has over over a computer is that human can self-learn to solve general search problems, while computers have to be programmed. Correct me if I am wrong, but although neural nets and other stochastic implementations can learn to produce good responses, they have always been applied in a very narrow scope. On the other hand, human can learn to play Chess, play Go, pay taxes, get a job, etc...
In the AI classes I attended, right from the get-go, the profs always talk about AI in a limited sense because there has been no success in the development of a generalized AI. I think we were not able to see our own advantages, because we have all been trained to think of AI, thus intelligence in general, as a specialized problem. In fact, our intellectual adaptability is, I think, what makes us special. You know, animals survive much better than us human. Yet, we can learn to survive (though not as well), learn to build cars (something I do see monkeys doing), and learn to build computers...
Cheers.
B. Pascal
OK, I'm not the OP, but I'll bite:
The chinese room argument depends on the idea that the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese. However, his role in the room has nothing to do with understanding anything other than the instructions he is given.
The problem with this is that the instructions are part of the decision process; i.e. the room containing data + operator may or may not be functionally intelligent (the point at issue) without requiring any part thereof to be intelligent. As far as the man's concerned, all he's doing is a programmed job. He could be replaced, notionally, with a processing unit, for all that his human intelligence is relevant.
Presuming for a moment that intelligence is the goal here, it's not merely the capacity to execute instructions which is at issue, but what those instructions are, and what any ancillary data might be.
Closing the cycle here, the man in the room need not understand a word of Chinese for the room as a whole (including him) to understand Chinese. Searle utterly failed in his argument to even account for that.
Actually, since the player handles the dice and controls what position they start and end in, a player with exceptionally fine motor control (or larger dice) could throw dice to land on whatever side they want. Thus, each roll of the dice becomes the equivalent of a move in chess: determining which piece(s) to move and how far to move them each turn. The computer should be able to match this capability as well - after all, a computer has successfully bowled a perfect game. Not to mention that each side has methods of cheating this as well - humans can use loaded dice, and computers can use *cough* "random" number generators.
That Big blue wasn't design to beat a Grand Master. It was design to beat Kasparov
Hmm...I'm not as taken by Chomsky as you seem to be; far from finding him "eloquent" or "concise", I consider his writing to be about as interesting as eating Grape Nuts to a metronome. I tried reading the article you linked, but was unable to get past the sentence that said, "The details need not concern us" because my eyes rolled up into my head and I couldn't see any more.
The whole issue of the so-called "Turing Test" revolves around details. The TT seems very attractive to people who never actually try to specify the details of what such a "test" might look like, and what its objectives might be. If you read Turing's original article, you'll find that he wasn't seriously proposing anything that could be described as as an even vaguely rigorous test for "machine intelligence". The "Turing Test" exists only in the minds of people who either didn't read Turing carefully, didn't unerstand what they read, or perhaps don't remember what they read.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
"That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy,"
Modern chess programs do more than brute force search. Even commercial game products now have strategy tweaks for the computer A.I.
Chessmaster allows users to create new playing styles, also called "personalities", by manipulating several dozen different settings, such as King Safety, Pawn Weakness, Randomness, Mobility, Positionality, Draw Factor.
Yale CS professor David Gelernter wrote an article about the match, expressing a quite different view.
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http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,986355,0
Dennett is a brilliant philosopher, but he's also well-known for propounding a particular agenda. While his view is plausible, it is not intrinsically more plausible than Gelernter's view.
By dwelling on the functional equivalence of Deep Blue chess and Kasparov chess, Dennett skillfully lays the assumption that this is the correct way to compare all differences between humans and machines. Rhetoric like "as far as we know" quietly asserts that all right-thinking intellectuals agree with him, while argument is dismissed as "cling[ing]... to brittle visions."
However, both his view and Gelernter's are merely expressions of the consequences of certain prior assumptions, and these assumptions are unprovable ones: function vs. being, for instance, or philosophical naturalism vs. methodological naturalism.
Gelernter adequately illustrates a counter-view that many of Dennett's peers would hold:
"...the idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind? It can win at chess, but not because it wants to. It isn't happy when it wins or sad when it loses. What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov? Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town? It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose."
"The more powerful your computer, the more sophisticated the behavior it can imitate. In the long run I doubt if there is any kind of human behavior computers can't fake, any kind of performance they can't put on. It is conceivable that one day, computers will be better than humans at nearly everything. I can imagine that a person might someday have a computer for a best friend. That will be sad--like having a dog for your best friend but even sadder.
"Computers might one day be capable of expressing themselves in vivid prose or fluent poetry, but unfortunately they will still be computers and have nothing to say. The gap between human and surrogate is permanent and will never be closed. Machines will continue to make life easier, healthier, richer and more puzzling. And human beings will continue to care, ultimately, about the same things they always have: about themselves, about one another and, many of them, about God. On those terms, machines have never made a difference. And they never will."
Dennett might not be wrong, but he might not be right.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is.
I think perhaps the real answer is that intelligence is the ability to do something it's not designed to do. So if a developer creates a chess playing algorithm, with all the appropriate evaluation factors, goal strategy etc. then the computer is able to execute that within that little predesigned world. Humans weren't designed to do algebra or play chess or speak whichever language is the native one, at best we got some hunter-gatherer instincts. Instead we make it up as we go along.
Let's take something relatively concrete, exact and objective like a card game. Now here's the kicker: I'm not going to tell you how the game is played until the AI is created, like when people are introduced to a game for the first time their brains are already (mostly) defined. The AI would have to take the rules, evaluate them and find an algorithm or strategic goals to reach. I have no doubt that the computer would be able to perform any calculations that strategy would involve with much greater presicion and less blunders than humans. I just doubt it would find the strategy.
So let's say I make up a game, and the AI sucks at it because it can't figure out how to play. Then you go back, design up and program a specific algorithm for that game and come back kicking my ass. Is that intelligence? Or again just execution of a human's intelligence with a computer's power? I've seen many AIs that are good at one specific challenge, but noone that's good at an unknown challenge. And while humans of course suck at something they haven't played before, at least they don't give a blank stare and "Program me?"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That last point of yous is exactly my problem with the Chinese Room Argument - for all that it's worth, the Room (assuming it's a closed unit) as such actually does seem to understand chinese - and my point is that the word "seems" in that sentence is irrelevant. A neuron is also simply doing what it was told to do (my laws of nature), so to speak. a neuron isn't intelligent. Neither are Glia cells or what-have-you. Thus, the infrastructure of intelligence doen't matter. Only the result. Of course AI isn't there yet, but we're getting there, using a combination of ugly hacks, smart heuristics and a bit of voodoo - just the way nature got there.
There was a half-joke amongst cognitive scientists every time the endless discussions about the definition of the word intelligence sprang up:
"Intelligence is what the brain does"
The sad part is that i think that that is actually one of the best definitions around.
It was just the first time a computer could plot the future fast enough and far enough that it unlikely to lose against an intelligent mind. Brute force vs Intelligence in a very specific game.
Now the race is on to create an AI that learns the game and does not use brute force that can beat a human. A computer program that can look at a board and get a "feeling" from the board as a whole and from each of the pieces.
Like those who misunderstood Turing's writing, you might want to be more careful about what you read (although perhaps you can't be blamed since you seem to have suffered a temporary eye spasm). When Chomsky says "the details need not concern us", he means the details aren't important in the context of what he was writing, not that the details are of no significance.
In the excerpt you began to read, he says, "There is no fixed Turing test; rather, a battery of devices constructed on this model" and leaves it at that because the discussion moves on to say why, even if you use the so-called "Turing test" (i.e. the approach proponents in AI try to use), it doesn't tell us anything. Whether or not we choose to call a computer "intelligent" is a question "of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage".
You and I both agree with Chomsky that believers in what's called "the Turing test" have misunderstood Turing's paper, and that there is no test that can be "passed" for a computer to be found "just as intelligent as a human" (or more so). This is something Chomsky's elaborated on, in detail, elsewhere and one reason I find his writing on the topic to be so important. See New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, for example. Or perhaps you'll want to pick up some Grape Nuts and a metronome instead...
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
There's an error in the executive summary. Of course computers had beaten plenty of GMs in matches prior to this defeat. Kasparov was the top GM (and continued to be until his retirement in '05) and that was the notable part of the defeat -- the fact that he was the top human player not that he was just a GM (of which there are hundreds, maybe thousands, in the world).
-- I'm embarassed to look like Hemos.
Deep Blue's win over Kasparov was the triumph of a human team that programed a machine with 200 years of chess knowledge that could be recalled without error. Period. This match was about the same as a spelling bee with a human vs. a spell check database.
No chess program that is only programmed with the moves and rules could ever beat a Grandmaster, International Master, or even a rated Master here in the USA. Ever. A chess program with the moves, rules AND Alpha-Beta search (that counts only the value of the pieces) might beat a Master occasionally on a very fast computer. Let me hash this out in the three stages of a chess game:
OPENING: Kasparov was beaten by another human who programmed 200 years of already-known opening moves into Deep Blue. Indeed, the last game was lost by Kasparov because he fell into a "known" opening trap. "Known" to the computer through human programming.
MIDDLE GAME: Strategy used by DB was programmed by a human Grandmaster. Then it is checked during the game by brute-force calculation. DB played roughly equal here. Every Grandmaster today checks his middle game ideas for tactics or traps with a computer that can find mistakes in a few minutes that would take a human days or weeks to find.
END GAME: Knowledge of end game positions and strategy was programmed by a human Grandmaster. Kasparov outplayed DB completely here.
No machine or software has ever beaten a Grandmaster without human intervention.
Let the computer try to beat a 12 year-old at Magic, or any other evolving CCG. Assuming you can get the PC to understand mechanics and the raw number of cards, the interactions are even more complex. The problem is, a programmer can't keep up with the designer's ability to create (or abuse) new mechanics. It would be like adding 180 to 350 new types of chess pieces every 3 months. If you can't program in the new abilities, the PC can't interpret what the card does (it certainly can't read the card), much evaluate individual cards, or build a deck.
This thing reads like a high school kid's book report:
What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all?
Did anyone read this "article" through to completion?
The success of computers in chess really brings up two questions in my mind. The first is: what does this say about chess? The second is: what does it say about computers?
A good way to think about the first question is to think about an even simpler case - such as SuDoKu. Like chess, SuDoKu is a persuit of many people who consider it pleasurable mental challenge - and some puzzles are of a sufficiently difficult level to thwart all but expert solvers. Yet, solving the most difficult SuDoKu puzzle is an instantaneous task for a brute-force computer solver.
Does that mean that SuDoKu is not worth playing, given that it can be trivially solved by machine? I think that makes about as much sense as saying that running is no longer a meaningful sport since nearly any motor vehicle can go several times faster than the world's fastest runner.
The point I am trying to come to is that SuDoKu isn't rendered meaningless by machine, but it's apparently silly to have SuDoKu competitions between humans and machines - just like it would be silly to put my Corolla as a contender in an olympic speed race. Although it would win...
(by the way, when I was learning MATLAB, I wrote a SuDoKu solver in it that was more intelligent than simple backtracking. That stuff is here)
The reason I am talking about SuDoKu is that the above argument is clearly true for it - the same argument is less apparent for chess. After all, that's why there are these Man Vs. Machine matches, and they're not always a complete slaughter one way or the other.
I would argue that chess is only different from SuDoKu in degree of complexity. The fact is, 10 years ago happened to be the time where the state of the art hardware and AI were about as good at solving chess as the best humans. I am sure solving SuDoKu on the earliest and most primitive computers would have been a challage, just like 'solving' chess was 10 years ago - but that difficulty is, again, only a matter of degree. It doesn't change the fact that the subject IS solvable and clearly sufficiently solvable by computer. I am sure that a Deep Blue-type project benefiting from the last 10 years' progress in hardware and AI would leave any human player in the dust, and easily.
But all that means is that man-machine chess competitions are meaningless, not that chess itself is somehow pointless. The search space is finite so ultimately a faster and more powerful computer will make up for its lack of the grandmasters' genius. Which doesn't diminish that genius.
So that's what computer chess means for the game of chess in my view. Not that much.
That brings me to the second question - what does computer success at chess say about computers? In my view, again, not much. Computers, as we all know, are stupid. They can do easy logic and math really quickly, however. If you think about it, the Deep Blue project was all about programming the sum of human chess insight into the machine. From the openings database, to the position evaluation function - Deep Blue didn't learn to play chess from scratch. It was gifted with the best distillation of centuries of chess knowledge. All it did was crunch the numbers faster in that framework. So if you think about it - Deep Blue was doing what all the computers are doing - crunching boring numbers once humans did all the creative stuff.
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Deep Blue moved 37. Be4
This positional move was unexpected by Kasparov and commentators - many called it a "Karpov-like" move. But the fact that it so surprised Kasparov was more an indication of how much he underestimated the chess knowledge and positional sense that was built into the hardware. The special purpose chips designed by Hsu allowed for a huge amount of positional evaluation in hardware that was far beyond the purely software "brute-force" calculation done at that time by PC programs like Fritz. Kasparov had trained for this match with Fritz and he evidently thought that Deep Blue would merely be a faster Fritz and hence was surprised when Deep Blue's play revealed a qualitative difference due to the special-purpose chess hardware.
Today, there would be no surprise since currently available PC programs routinely evaluate Be4 as the best move in that position. This is a consequence of both much faster CPUs (more brute force available thanks to Moore's law) and much more chess knowledge being built into the programs (faster CPUs also allow faster access to positional evaluation algorithms).
In other words, in the 10 years since the match, ordinary PCs (with better chess software) have caught up to Deep Blue - at least in some respects.
It is true that a skilled player can provide better examples, and better review after the game. Having such a resource is wonderful, but much can be learned simply by playing. As a specific example I offer myself. I played go for over a year against a computer program before ever facing a live opponent, and it wasn't even a good computer program. I am now about 3 kyu now and I would estimate the rank of the program I played against as approximately 22k. When I logged on to the No Name Go Server for the first time, a 9k estimated my rank at 17k based on a 9 stone game. I quickly attained a rank of about 15kyu, though I *think* my first confirmed rank was indeed 17kyu. In that time I read no materials on Go other than the rules that came with the soft ware (which was a bundle called Mind Games Entertainement Pack distributed by EDO software). So yes you can learn without a stronger opponent to teach. The only thing I had as a head start was some experience as a (poor) chess player from high school, so the general habit of thinking through a series of moves was something I had already learned. Among the concepts I at partly understood from mere play included a number of end game tesuji for simple captures, the trade-off of speed vs connectedness among the nobi, the diagonal, the one space jump, the knights move jump, the two space jump, the large knights move jump, and the diagonal jump. In this day and age, there are many helpful websites, and go books are easy to find on go related vendor sites, as well as Amazon/Barnes&Noble etc so you don't have to discover everything yourself like I did in 1995-96, so if you add some reading to regular play against almost any opponent, you will make progress, particularly if you increase the handicap when one player starts winning regularly.
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I believe that if it had been the case that the Deep Blue had better, as you say "horizon", Kasparov would have had no problem with that.
The problem that Kasparov saw was that the computer had crashed and was allowed to be restarted. Worst, actually is that IBM said that the computer didn't crash but had encountered a programmed HALT instruction. In my opinion, this seems like a programmer's way of saying "I don't know what should happen in this case so let's stop for awhile and let some humans restart me after giving me some additional info."
The other problem was that IBM was unable or unwilling to provide traces of the decision trees that Deep Blue had gone through and the reason for choosing one branch over another. I could be wrong but I find it hard to believe that, at a minimum, a partial list wouldn't have been available. My chess program will tell me which branches it thinks is superior. Also, if I wrote this kind of code, I would make sure I could reproduce the game in order to analyze the game to improve the program. Since the software is deterministic, all that is required for that is to keep track of positions in the game where the better branch is not selected - either because multiple branches have the same value or because a slightly less favorable branch is selected in order to add some element of randomness.
Given that IBM is unable or unwilling to provide that information, given that it makes no sense for them not to have collected that information, and given that the computer had to be restarted on occasion, my personal belief if that Kasparov is the winner by default.
I believe that computers can, or eventually will be able to, beat the best chess player in the world. I just don't believe this happened in 1997.
Last I looked into that landmark, no one said the processing power to do it properly was from a toy. What started to emerge was the criteria of "fool a person" rewarded cheap tricks to fool a person.
Other definitions of successor tests included "Allow the machine to be clearly different, but judge the value and worth of the output". Separate but equal/superior.
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> My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is.
This is because we don't have a good definition for what intelligence is. Like ancient doctors who prescribed remedies for "fever" with no knowledge of what was causing it, we're mentioning syptoms / effects instead of the root cause / process.
The REAL reason we don't have an "intelligent" computer is that we can't put intelligence in explicit basic steps. Everything we do (get water) is so abstract and full of other steps (get glass, get to sink, learn sink interface, use sink) that we can't write the steps behind intelligence on a completely base level that can be understood and expressed in terms of how hardware currently works, or the capabilities of a Turing Complete language.
I have no doubt that if we can learn what intelligence is (we still don't know I believe) we can make a computer copy it.
In the past we'd have said a chess winning computer was intelligent, because only smart people can win at chess, right? Things like seeing Checkers reduced to a finite series of patterns means that anyone, followng a list can win at Checkers without understanding why. This doesn't mean the approach is unintelligent. In this case, the computer, following the series of lists is dumb, but there is definately intelligence behind the recognition of the lists and how to link them together. Given Checkers is simpler than Chess, this COULD be done with NOTHING but straight crunching positions, but intelligence sped it up.
Checkers is much easier to crunch (only 2 types of pieces, half the board used, fewer # of pieces, fewer ways of moving, left, right, jump left, jump right, add backwards for king, maybe have repeated jumps)
The shift of moral considerations to a "product" only becomes valid when that product itself acquires intelligence as recognized by some other test. We do in fact see very moral computers already! "I see you (got tired of working and just started closing windows everywhere.) Would you like to save your file?"
... with the same amusing results as when people fudge the gray areas.
A moral computer is a total snap - because morality is rules. Even the "gray areas" can be parsed
Intelligence is a raw processing capability. The famous SF machines were intelligent but not moral, and probably not wise.
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