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16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress
vmartell writes "The 16th World Computer Chess Championship is now in progress in Beijing, as part of the Computer Games Championship. Currently in the lead are Rybka 3.0, recognized as the world's strongest chess engine and Hiarcs, another commercial engine. Another curiosity is a Java ME based engine running on a Nokia phone, which is currently being trounced by the other engines. A very interesting sideline: before the computer tournament, a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka. The result? Rybka won both games!"
How much of the "skill" in computerized chess comes from the programmers and how much comes from the raw cpu horsepower available? TFA was quoting 40-core boxes competing with Nokia cell phones.
Chess has become boring, like checkers or backgammon.
To even competitively play at the local club level you really need a ridiculously deep memorization of openings and endings. At the grandmaster level, they've basically memorized the tables used by computers.
Average games of chess only last around 60 moves. The depth of opening and closing books increasingly has reduced the middle game of actually interesting play. If it's not down to only 1-5 moves, it will be soon.
The game will be dead--or at least not interesting enough to be seriously played--long before it is solved.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Maybe it's a reference to Bobby Fischer..
Computer go players are now one Dan, and rising... Already better than most amateurs ; pros can't beat Mogo with 9 stones anymore.
The sad reality is, yes the women certainly can't compete with the men in top level world chess. I'm not sure who it's sad for though - the men or the women. You see to be great at chess you have to be obsessive about it. The more situations you've seen, the greater your ability to avoid lines of play that look good on instinct but leave you in a hole. So world champion chess players tend to be even more obsessive and single minded (to the exclusion of almost everything else including social interaction) than other world champions. People who get that good at chess don't do much else. It's like OCD on OCD. They study study study and study some more. In a lot of ways it's self destructive. Most women just won't do that to themselves. I believe this is the real reason women aren't as good in chess. They're not stupider than men, they're actually smarter.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When I think of powerful chess programs, I think of Deep Fritz. It did beat the human World Champion after all. Does anyone know why Deep Fritz isn't competing?
It is also why men won't stop for directions when lost and women are able to care for families so well.
Bwahaha. Good one. Apt name for you too.
Sweeping generalizations are always wrong.
Chessmaster lets you select the strength of the player that you are playing against. Other chess games probably have the same capability.
Yes, chess is very boring when it's impossible to win. But when I play Chessmaster I always select an opponent who is just slightly better than me. I often lose but I feel really good when I win.
Regarding Go, some people just don't like the game. I sort of enjoy it, but I like Chess a lot more.
Cow Cube
There are several commercial use for better engines:
1) Game analysis. When you have played a game against and lost, you try to understand why you lost. Sometimes it is because you made an obvious blunder, but when you get better at the game, you start loosing for strategical reasons (lost control of a certain square, etc, etc). Having a good engine helps you try new ideas, and play a lot of what-if scenarios
2) Game understanding. When you follow a live tournament between grandmasters, having a good engine can give you an explanation about what the underlying ideas are ("Why doesn't he plays Nb6? You try it, and get the answer instantly")
3) Correspondence & Centaur Chess. Correspondence chess are long running games where both players have access to whatever they want. It delivers very subtle games, where the strategy is a very important aspect, as all the tactical blunders are removed by the use of good chess engines. Centaur chess is the same with lower time control.
And, of course, bragging rights are important too: having a better engine than other people in the chess club is a bit like having the better graphic card among fps players...
As you may have seen, playing against the engine is not one of the uses. Rybka is supposedly at 3200 elo. By definition, 200 elo points higher means you have a 75% win probability. The current world champion is at 2800, which means that he have a 6% win probability against rybka. Good club chess play is around 2000 (it takes several years to reach that level -- at that level, you can generally play blind, or multiple opponents, etc, etc). Such players have a 1 against 4000 chance against a 3200 player. Which means zero chance...
After having dealt the last seven years with the anime-obsessed crowd invading Go, and (at least in my limited experience) being nothing but whiny about how much there is to learn, I'd say that engineers, chess players, and heads of state (though to be fair, in this case, he was merely Prime Minister and was assassinated trying to avoid the militarization of Japan pre-WWII) would be welcome back into the fold.
On that note, I wouldn't say I'm an arrogant Go player. I've played chess at the local club level for awhile, but then I realized that I'd rather enjoy a game of chess with a friend over a beer out at the park than several hours of study to keep my opening and endgame up. I picked up Go about a year after that, and while I'm not very good, I enjoy it and enjoy teaching it to others.
The huge difference is the starting position in chess is a single setup. White had very few moves to choose from and black has only a few responses. Many early moves are catastrophic, narrowing the search space. Other moves result in the same position as a different series of moves, or as a different series with the colors flipped.
Go on the other hand has an immense number of opening moves. While simplifications can be made because the board is not directional, relatively fewer moves and responses are catastrophic early on. The search space gets huge fast.
Chess is well into the game before you make it past a few hundred megabytes of the opening books which have been searched and played out and already decided on. Also, if a chess computer is forced to play from the opening position, it is pretty much lost at sea vs. a strong human player.
It might be interesting what a human/computer combo could accomplish in Go. Are computers good at the more tactical aspects of Go?
t
I had a similar experience in 1978: I had written a neat but slow chess program in Basic for the Apple II. The guy who organized the first West Coast Computer Fair chess tournament encouraged me to enter, and I did not fair so well against the programs nicely crafted in assembler language. Still, since I was handing out free copies of my program, and people liked that, it was a fun experience.
I actually did a little chess programming last week. I am finishing up the 3rd edition of my Java AI book (self plug: a PDF version will always be available on my web site) and since I have generally "caught the Java generics" disease, I re-coded the chess alpha-beta search example using the new collection classes and generics - it ran so much slower than the old native data type + array version that I archived and tossed the new version :-)