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.

Comments

What is "intelligence"

[pzs]

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

Re:What is "intelligence"

[UbuntuDupe]

People seem to be very sensitive about computers doing things they think only humans should be able to do.

True, but I think that's just a special case of the general rule that, "People don't like when their expertise is systematized so that others can easily gain it." (Probably a better way to say that.)

Re:What is "intelligence"

[lawpoop]

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 guess you can count me as one of those people. I don't think it's a big deal that a computer can solve complex math problem or play chess well. Most people would have a difficult time with that. While math, science and engineering are great things and have provided a lot of benefit to us, I'm more interested in the sort of 'hunter/gatherer on the African Savannah' problems. Those to me seem to be the basis of human intelligence.

For instance, how do you see a trail as it winds over grassland and leads into the woods? How does one see a year old trail that is partially overgrown, or a new trail not completely tramped down. How do you track down an animal from smattering of scat, nibbles and tracks over rocks, dirt, grassland, and the tree line? How does a human being see a camouflaged predator slinking behind the tree line? How do you read the sky and know what the weather will be later that day? How do you look at a river and know if it's crossable or not? Back at home, how do you play your relatives, friends, and enemies in the tribe so that you are elected leader when the Big Man passes away? Or how do you manage to convince your husband that your new pregnancy is his, and not your secret lovers'?

Computers seem to be like idiot savants. They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books. That's a very useful tool in our technological society, but I don't think it's the basis of human intelligence. Like some Autistic person, computers suck as the basics of social interaction, which any three year old understands the basic concepts of. I remember my friend's three year old putting on her parents clothes and getting dressed up when she heard that her parents were going to a Halloween party -- all without prompting. What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'? Or simple thinks like standing on two legs or filling a glass of water -- never mind hunting and eating another animal, or following a trail.

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... Well, my definition includes things that organic nervous systems are good at, such as walking, migrating, or hunting.

It is a game of logic

[Ngarrang]

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.

This article would be more relevant if

[feijai]

...Dennett (the man!) started with an acknowledgement of the fact that IBM cheated.

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.

Re:Some of the problems.

[oni]

The Computer doesn't care it is just focusing on the game 100%

and more to the point, the computer doesn't even know what chess is. It's just adding, subtracting, fetching instructions from memory, etc. It's kind of like how a guy in a box doesn't really understand chinese, or how none of your brain cells actually know what slashdot is.

I wonder if it would be more accurate to say that a system, which included a computer as one of its parts, but also included a human programmer, beat Kasparov. Kind of like how it's not accurate to say that a few neurons and muscle fibers posted to slasdot. My brain cells and my fingers don't know what they're doing, any more than Big Blue knew what it was doing.

Re:It Didn't Mean Anything...

[schweini]

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)

Re:the supercomputers advantage...

[DrVomact]

But most importantly, IBM's team of chess masters and coders modified the system between chess games after analyzing Kasparov's strategy the previous game. That is, he wasn't playing Deep Blue: he was playing Deep Blue being adapted in semi-real-time by a bunch of human experts. And crucially, IBM hid this fact, knowing that it'd be (rightly) considered highly suspect.

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.