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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.
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
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.
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.
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?
You could always pick up Go. Computers are going to suck at that for a lot longer than they sucked at chess
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I doubt things will be that different the day that chess is solved. The only reason that grand masters and computers have been so equal in strength the past years is almost certainly that both humans and computers are playing pretty close to perfect already as it is. The day computers play perfect chess the grand masters will, of course, not be able to win but I'm pretty sure they'll be able to get a fair share of draws.
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)
every chess novice learns that you play the board, not the opponent
the instant you make a potentially inferior move to sucker your opponent, you deserve what you get
Why is this "highly suspect"? I suppose you might think so if you made the mistake of believing that Kasparov was actually playing against a piece of hardware (the "computer"); but of course he wasnt. Kasparov was playing against a team of chess-knowledgeable programmers; Kasparov was playing against software. The only remarkable thing about the computer itself was its speed--it was fast enough to carry out the laborious recursive brute-force searches for optimal moves in about the same time as a human player would take to decide his move. In theory, you could have done the same thing with a 70s era computer...but the game would have taken forever.
I'm not a chess player, but it's my understanding that during important tournaments, players often talk to advisers to determine their strategy in the next game against a tough opponent. How is this different from the programmers tweaking the software between games? Fundamentally, this was a contest between Kasparov and a team of programmers. Kasparov surely knew that, and accepted the match under those conditions. So I don't think the IBM team can be accused of "cheating".
The fact that such accusations have been made shows how people--even the paranormal crowd that posts to /.--easily forget how computers and computer software work. Once you remind yourself that this is not a case of "man vs. machine", then the philosophical significance of the contest wanes. Computers do not play chess...only people do.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Apparently the world's greatest chess master has a lot to learn from you. Must be nice to have absolute platitudes to rely on. Fact is, in poker, chess, and life, you need to play the opponent. Risk takers are beaten in a different way.
This statement comparing the number of moves to the number of atoms in the univere seems to make a lot of sense, up until the point the grey matter kicks in.
It's a little like saying: There are more natural numbers than their are atoms in the known universe, so there's no way [anything computational] could ever prove that there is no highest prime number. Turns out, that there are mechanisms far more effective at this sort of thing than brute force.
Similarly for chess algoriths. Whole swaths of those 10^105 operational positions can be dismissed based on the fact that they would never maximize the probability of winning (e.g. immediately pulling out your queen and putting her in threat from the opponents pawns...bad idea, making all future positions irrelevant)
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.