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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 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.
I was under the impression that the rules allowed them to do that: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c. 8.html
"13. At any time during play, IBM may replace any or all of the computer hardware and/or software being used to play the games"
But it's still kind of dirty..
Slashdot: You will never find a more wretched hive of spam and zealotry. We must be cautious.
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?
Hate to break it to you, but "No [anything computational] will ever be able to duplicate this feat.", Machines or otherwise. This is due to the fact that the complete tree of moves (i.e. all possible plies of the entire game from starting position) has on the order of 10^120 nodes to evaluate, which is slightly bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.
When a modern chess-playing program does its evaluations it plays out a certain ply depth bounded by the fact that each ply is exponentially larger. I believe 12 ply is about what Deep Blue played at (I might be wrong on that). The program at no times attempts to play the game to a completion state, but rather finds the move that maximizes the minimum loss (as per a minimax algorithm presumably.)
In short, the situation you propose above would take more time than our Sol has left to burn while utilizing more memory than the universe has in atoms.
P.S. to nitpickers: If you find mistakes above, please correct them. I do think this is pretty much on target though...
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?"
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....
There in is why many who play chess don't take this match seriously.
Some flaws, first to play a grand master you need to qualify and play others. Then you enter a tournament and build up to play. This leave a trail of your style of play, your weaknesses and your strengths. A true match, your opponent would study your last games before he moved the first piece!
In this case, it was completely bypassed, placing the single player against machine at a disadvantage. Should it have been a real tournament play, I suspect the machine would have done well but lost. And there was one game I watched where he lost and he was either having a bad day or tossed it.
Backgammon "went down" quite a while ago. A couple Googled citations:
Hans Berliner: ``Backgammon computer program beats world champion''
Artificial intelligence 14 (1980), 205-220
Hans Berliner: ``Computer Backgammon''
Scientific American 243:1, 64-72 (1980)
I remember reading the Sci Am one in high school; excellent article if you can find a copy--Berliner is/was (still alive?) quite an authority on computer chess as well.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If I had mod points and hadn't already posted I'd mod you up.
KInd of puts all the whining and cries of foul play (especially the ones that specifically say "cheated") into perspective. If Kasparov knew what he was getting into he can't complain about the outcome.
Its DEEP BLUE, not big blue!!!!!!!!!!!
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.