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16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress

Posted by timothy on from the all-the-hipsters-are-there dept.

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!"

39 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. The human aspect by SKPhoton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The human aspect by Onaga · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When you realize the search space involved, and computer chess does break down to a search problem, then even small algorithm tweaks can have a large effect. A naive algorithm on a 40-core box will lose to better algorithm on a PDA. So in other words, it's not the the number of cycles you have, but how you use them.

    2. Re:The human aspect by somersault · · Score: 2, Interesting

      it's not the the number of cycles you have, but how you use them.

      True to an extent, but using the same algorithm on each machine in a timed game would result in the 40-core box trouncing the PDA - especially in the mid-game where there are a crazy amount of possible paths.

      Deep Blue had a database of endgames to use (and possibly starting techniques, been a while since I read about it) - a mobile could use the same technique to do well near the end without doing much calculation, though it's not exactly a very 'interesting' approach from an AI point of view. And it probably won't even survive until an endgame scenario if it's anything as bad as I am compared to a decent strength computer chess opponent.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    3. Re:The human aspect by halcyon1234 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      With something like Deep Blue, most of the skill did come from the programmers, it's true. Most of Deep Blue's "intelligence" came from brute-forcing its way through each move. However, since it would take billions of years to work that out, they made sure to shrink the search space; they "taught" Deep Blue about the most common Grand-Master level opening moves, the most desirable end games, and how to recognize unfavorable situations without having to expand the entire tree.

      What they effectively taught (or began to teach) Deep Blue was rudimentary pattern recognition-- knowing how a board is going to turn out without having to figure it out on the fly. And really, that's the more interesting bit, because that is exactly what human players do.

      When a Grand Master plays a game, there are certainly situations where they are working out a game tree that is a few layers deep. But the limitations of the human brain simply won't allow him to work out an entire tree, or even every move in one layer. It's beyond human wetwear. But what isn't is pattern recognition. The Grand Master has spent hundreds of days pre-processing the information; he's played thousands of games, read books on theory, watched other matches, and so forth. He already knows, for example, leaving a King exposed is going to turn out bad. He can see that positions of his pieces around an opponent's weakness leave for only a small subset of desirable moves (even though there are thousands of possible moves). He can recognize when a subset of moves would be very bad for him and instantly eliminate them without expanding the tree to his inevitable defeat. This instant recognition leaves free cycles for evaluating on-the-fly decisions about the current situation.

      A human Grand Master's neural net has been trained to recognize good and bad patters just as surely as anyone else has been trained to recognize hot pan = pain without having to stop and think about it, and that a can of soup needs to be open to be delicious without having to mentally invent the can opener.

      The other advantage a human player has over a machine is that our hardware is much, much better. We've got more gigahertz all up ins ours-- and we have the advantage of an amazingly well trained and time-tested neural net built in.

      But with enough advancement in computing-- from massively complex neural nets, to distributed computing, to quantum computing, and even better manufacturing techniques to ram more Giga-giga-giga hertz onto a slab of silicone, it's only a matter of time until computers have equal or superior hardware.

      From there, it's just a matter of designing a computer that can learn, and giving it the online records of every regulation chess match ever played, and letting it figure out how to be the Grandest Master. Once its learning is in place, it's trivial to copy and redistribute that knowledge.

      As for a computer starting with a blank slate and learning the concepts of game, board, opponent, horse, touch, feel, love-- well, that's just an abstraction of the same problem. It's a longer way off, but if a perfect, learning Chess computer is inevitable, why not that?

      BTW, highly recommended reading on this topic, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. It also has a bibliography of a few hundred other excellent follow-ups.

      --
      UTF-8: There and Back Again
  2. Fish by setagllib · · Score: 2, Funny

    Transliterated back into Russian, Rybka means Fish. Maybe I don't know the joke, but I've never known fish to be particularly strong chess players.

    --
    Sam ty sig.
    1. Re:Fish by tangent3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Maybe it's a reference to Bobby Fischer..

  3. Women's grandmaster? by joeflies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does chess really need to separate the rankings between male and female champions? Isn't this a sport that gender really doesn't factor in?

    1. Re:Women's grandmaster? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're a bit mistaken.

      The intellectual abilities of both men and women are essentially equal. The key differentiation between the cognitive abilities of men and women is that men are able to confront a problem by breaking things down into smaller parts and focus on solving those to form a complete solution while the minds of women take problems holistically and solve based on tradeoffs between different sections of a problem area.

      This would seem to benefit women chess players, but the fact is that chess is a game with many intricacies and the ability to analyze at the micro level (as in visualizing x number of steps ahead) is a critical skill. To take the game holistically works fine at the lower levels (and may be a superior form of cognition for those levels) because a full understanding of the game as an exhibition of ebb and flow gives various insights that a purely logical player would not apprehend immediately. What is clear, though, is that male chess grand champions are able to apprehend the holistic game while female chess grand champions are not able to make the jump to pure logic and focus.

      This is the unfortunate truth about the split in chess rankings. It is also why men won't stop for directions when lost and women are able to care for families so well.

    2. Re:Women's grandmaster? by rm999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a controversial topic - while men clearly excel in physical sports, the mean intelligence of men and women are approximately the same. Often, apparent differences in intelligence (e.g. income) have societal explanations.

      On the other hand, some experiments (http://www.polymath-systems.com/intel/essayrev/sexdiff.html) indicate that the variance in intelligence is greater in men: there are more very smart men than women, but also more very stupid men. Chess, a game that very smart people excel at, tends to be dominated by men. It's not that gender factors into the game per se, but the same could be said for football.

      That said, the article summary "a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka; the result? Rybka won both games!" is probably a troll because Rybka could beat any human; but I still chuckled...

    3. Re:Women's grandmaster? by syousef · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    4. Re:Women's grandmaster? by SL+Baur · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Women's grandmaster? by overzero · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

      That link says "men" in it, but in fact includes women as well... or rather one woman, Judit Polgar, at #27. The 2nd ranked woman doesn't make the top 100 (ELO: 2618).

    6. Re:Women's grandmaster? by somersault · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have never considered income to be directly proportional to intelligence. It's kind of a bell curve. The smartest people are in the middle and probably get paid about right - management and unskilled labourers tend to get paid amounts quite disproportionate to the amount of work they do or how intelligent they are. Chess skill isn't directly related to intelligence (as in generally accepted IQ 'intelligence' - there are plenty of different types of intelligence recognised in Psychology) anyway - a highly intelligent man who hasn't ever played chess before would probably lose to a girl of average intelligence, as long as the child has a lot of experience.

      the article summary "a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka; the result? Rybka won both games!" is probably a troll because Rybka could beat any human

      Exactly.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    7. Re:Women's grandmaster? by Wolfier · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're also slightly mathematically mistaken because intellectual abilities between two populations are not directly comparable without any summary statistics.

      If you take the "average" or "median" of intellectual abilities of all men, and the average of intellectual abilities of all women, they're essentially equal.

      However, a greater "variance" among men's intelligence (or ability by any measurement, for that matter), means that there are more men at both ends of the spectrum.

      All other points regarding compartmentalizing, tradeoffs, micro level, asking for directions, caring for families, etc. are observations totally irrelevant to chess at best, folklores or stereotypes at worst.

  4. Boring by foo+fighter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Boring by isBandGeek() · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Pretty much everything gets boring when over-analyzed, right? Besides maybe politics or the stock market. Because no individual will ever figure either of the two out.

    2. Re:Boring by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm guessing that's a snide remark on my spelling..

      http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnt

      is how the English spell it.. ya know, the namesake of the language?

      It's also how we spell it here in Australia.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    3. Re:Boring by HappyEngineer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The tutorials in Chessmaster aren't tedium. At least, I didn't think they were. They don't involve any sort of massive memorization.

      Really, all you need to do to reach a basic competency (say 1000 FIDE) is to learn how to deploy your pieces, learn the basics about how to checkmate with various pieces, then just play lots of games against a computer opponent who is just slightly better than you.

      I really like the Chessmaster opponents. You can select opponents based on their score and move up the ladder as you learn how to play.

      You don't need to memorize 10 moves deep in order to enjoy the game.

      --
      Cow Cube
    4. Re:Boring by 7+digits · · Score: 2, Informative

      Whatever. Let's reply to that obvious troll.

      1) You need opening preparation to play. Well, that's a given, and it was already the case 20 years ago. Now, with computers, opening preparation is easier, so players are better prepared.

      2) Grandmasters have not memorized ending tablebases, first because it is impossible, and second, because grandmasters are still much much better than computers in endgames. Endgame is not about memorisation, but about technique. And yes, you have to work that too.

      3) Average chess games is 40 moves long, not 60

      4) Computers make opening books deeper but also wider: lines that were considered unplayable are now playable. This adds diversity to the games.

      5) Middlegame last anywhere from 0 to 20 moves. Not "1 to 5".

      6) Capablanca already said that chess was so analysed that it was boring and draw in 1930. Guess what: he was wrong.

      So, what is exactly your complain ? That you have to work a lot to play competitively at your local chess club ? Well, that is not because of computers, it is because the players there are better than you are.

      And that is not due to computer play. It is due to the internet. Because on the chess servers, you have people playing chess as if it was WoW. So, the guy you face at that local chess club, maybe he plays 40 "3+0" games a day...

    5. Re:Boring by Wildclaw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Go is considerably more difficult than chess because of how the game moves around the board. It isn't the branching factor per se, but the fact that weaknesses left behind sometimes won't get exploited until as far as 100 or even 200 moves later on. In the meantime, players will try to direct the game in such a way that they can exploit the opponent's weaknesses while protecting their own. Also, the other way around, make use of their strength while preventing the opponent from making use of his.

      Without a higher level concept of the board, it is impossible for a computer to understand such ideas, and reading doesn't help because the depth is simply to deep. Monte Carlo bots try by playing out lots of complete game variations rapidly to get a somewhat understanding of the board, but in the end it fails because such playouts are overly simplistic.

      This isn't to say that go computers won't beat us someday, but it will be tougher than chess. Also, one point you made stands out to me as arguing for go, even if computers become better.

      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.

      Due to how go works, memorization isn't nescessary to the same degree. Of course, having some common sequences memorized helps, but in general it is better to have a generic idea about different patterns as to understand the strategic and tactical implications of moves.

      While there are established patterns (joseki) that are used in corners, players often deviate from them based on how the rest of the board looks. And when that happens, knowing the joseki is not very useful except to tell you that the player deviated from it. That is why there is a common saying "learn joseki, lose two stones: forget joseki, improve three stones".

      Those confined to memorized patterns lose to those with more open minds. Still, studying some joseki is useful, because it helps to broaden you view on what good and bad patterns are.

    6. Re:Boring by MagdJTK · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How does this shit get modded interesting?

      Chess has become boring, like checkers or backgammon.

      Then don't play it. I find it boring too, but I don't look down on people who enjoy it, just as I would hope that they wouldn't look down on me for my interests.

      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.

      Really? You mean people who put effort into learning the game are better at it?! How unfair!!!

      PROTIP: You should play chess with people of similar abilities to you, not grandmasters.

      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.

      Just untrue. Opening books are getting bigger, but endtables can only just manage 6 pieces. It takes a lot more than five moves to get from the end of an opening to a position with only 6 men on the board.

      The game will be dead--or at least not interesting enough to be seriously played--long before it is solved.

      Bollocks. It might transform the way that it's played at the top level, but it will have little to no effect on two amateurs playing against each other.

      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.

      And just in case people hadn't realised you were an arrogant wanker, you throw in an insult to another group of hobbyists! Way to go! It will be a long time before computers get good at Go and even when they do, it won't affect human players because of reasons I've given above.

    7. Re:Boring by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, this was why Bobby Fischer stopped playing chess.

      He may have been as crazy as a bedbug, but that doesn't mean he didn't understand chess. The beauty of chess is its intuitive challenge, but gradually, over the years, an encyclopedic knowledge of past games has come t count for as much as insight.

      Towards the end of his life, Fischer developed a variant of chess where the initial positions of the pieces were shuffled, but in a way that preserved all legal chess moves. This eliminates the value of having a vast database of chess openings.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:Boring by CodeBuster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      They have already been trying to crack Go for decades now, but Go has not yielded as easily to the game tree search methods and position value functions as Chess did. The number of possible boards that can occur in Chess is thought to be around 10^40, with substantial reductions possible by applying chess specific knowledge and taking advantage of the properties of the game of Chess, whereas the number of boards that could occur in Go is orders of magnitude more, perhaps 1.74×10^172, and tends to stay constant throughout the game (the number of available moves does not generally decrease much as play progresses as it tends to do in Chess) which is many more boards than there are atoms in the universe (for a more complete discussion of the computational complexity of Go the wiki article, Go and mathematics is actually quite good). No, Go will not be beaten in the same way that Chess was no matter how powerful computers get. If we want to crack Go then we will need some new advancements in AI (which would probably be useful in their own right even if you don't care about Go) and game playing methods that go beyond game trees and search.

  5. "Little Fish" - in Czech, not Russian by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka

    The page also goes into detail on the name...

    --
    No sig today...
  6. Boring Verbs. by Ostracus · · Score: 2, Informative

    "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."

    Considering Go's harder. I'd say they're welcome to try.

    --
    Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
    1. Re:Boring Verbs. by linca · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Computer go players are now one Dan, and rising... Already better than most amateurs ; pros can't beat Mogo with 9 stones anymore.

    2. Re:Boring Verbs. by HappyEngineer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Playing chess against even a modest PC is no fun any more. Anybody less than a grand master will be destroyed.

      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
    3. Re:Boring Verbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We have a number of algorithmic approaches to attack games. Many of them can't work in reasonable time on games with large search space. This is not simply a matter of hardware. There are more possible games of Go (on a standard 19x19 board, rather than the beginners 9x9 board that recent computers have done well on) then there are atoms in the universe. You couldn't even build a memory to store the possibilities. An exhastive search of connect 4 is possible, an exhastive search of Go is simply not (without a breakthrough in computing similar to the magnitude of the invention of the computer).

      Other techniques show promise and may offer paths to go down, so I'm not saying a good computer standard go player will never happen, but the game theory complexity of Go is an entirely different magnitude to the game theory complexity of Chess, and the vague notion so many people have that if you throw enough hardware and research at a computing problem you will solve it is simply naive.

    4. Re:Boring Verbs. by Wildclaw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Computer go players are now one Dan, and rising

      Give me an example of one go bot that has been able to maintain 1 dan over a longer period of time on a go server. Crazystone is the best I have seen, and while it did jump into 1d for a short time, it quickly went back to 1k again where it has been steadily for quite a while.

      Also, they don't seem to be improving that much right now. They did have a big breakthrough when Monte Carlo algorithms were introduced, and a little more with using improved processors power to maximize the monte carlo brute forcing. But the problems are now beginning to show, and that is that brute force is still brute force even if it is using a more appropriate version for go.

      pros can't beat Mogo with 9 stones anymore.

      The two rematches with 7 stones didn't go so well though. The pro beat MoGo in both. The game records were quite embarrasing including a total blunder from MoGos side.

      On the other hand, crazystone won an 8 handicap game vs a pro.

      Still, I don't find these games vs pros very interesting. Lots of even games vs amateurs is what should be used to judge strength. High handicap games simply don't scale linearly enough to give any good indication of rating, and are in general to variable in result (meaning you need more games to get an accurate result), because they rely on the mistake of the weaker player, more than the strength of the stronger player.

    5. Re:Boring Verbs. by haystor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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
    6. Re:Boring Verbs. by trb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Saying that go is harder than chess is like saying that the Empire State Building is harder to lift than the Chrysler Building; the complexity of both games is well beyond the horizon of human capability, and is likely to remain so. Because there are more possible moves in one ply of go than in one ply of chess doesn't make the whole game harder, better, or more interesting for people to play. If you like, you can play the games with a fast clock and go by your wits. Or if you want a bigger think, you can lengthen the time controls (or use a calendar instead of a clock). Droning on about which is harder is pompous, and if you're a go player and you can't beat an average player at chess, then how relevant is your opinion of how much easier chess is? (The reverse is also true, but it seems that the "our game is harder" rant is more the province of go players.)

  7. The human aspect... by Ostracus · · Score: 2, Funny

    "So in other words, it's not the the number of cycles you have, but how you use them."

    That's what she said.

    --
    Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
  8. Deep Fritz by telchine · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Deep Fritz by sokoban · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because Deep Rybka is considerably stronger than Deep Fritz.

      http://64.68.157.89/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_view=threads&p=221014&t=23997&sid=40fc40362255abca455eb72ef938f2aa

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
  9. Re:Completely off-topic by somersault · · Score: 2, Informative

    This story, for example, apparently has zero comments.

    Here I was thinking I could get a Turk related first post :( At least Hiarcs almost rhymes with Turk. I didn't actually realise that the name was a reference to this - should have known what with the rest of the series being full of references.

    Is anyone really surprised that a computer beat a human grandmaster twice in a row? As computers get more powerful, it is inevitable that they will completely outclass humans in games with perfect knowledge. There were times when Kasparov fooled Deep Blue's algorithms a couple of times (presumably giving it a piece or two in return for a square with significant strategic advantage), but they just trained it so that it wouldn't fall for those tricks again. I honestly wouldn't be surprisd if a grandmaster never won a tournament game against a chess supercomputer ever again.

    --
    which is totally what she said
  10. Re:What's the market for these engines? by 7+digits · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  11. "Arrogant" Go Players? by MasterOfMagic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  12. I feel for the Java ME developer :-) by MarkWatson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 :-)

  13. Why Go is better than Chess by Paradigm_Complex · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    This is obviously trolling, but what the heck. Chess has been dominated by computers for quite some time now - many have moved on to Go, and they still fail to beat amateur-level Go players. There are practical reasons why a Go AI is more difficult to program than a Chess one, which I'm sure by the time this has been posted will be explained in great detail by other replies.

    What I want to explain is why Go is better than Chess. It is not because it is more difficult for computers. While Chess doesn't really scale well, Go can be scaled down quite nicely to where the number of moves that have to be read out is equivalent to that of a Chess game. On 9x9 boards, Go AIs are rapidly catching up to humans. MoGo, for instance, consistently beats many amateur-level go players on 9x9's. There is more lost in the transition to a smaller board than simply brute-force reading, but the example still stands.

    The reason Go is better than Chess is that unlike Chess much of it's depth is a natural, mathematical result of the very simple rule set. Essentially the entire game:

    Players take turns placing pieces on the board. When a piece or group of pieces by one team is surrounded (ie, no empty spaces touching any of them in the group), the pieces are removed from the board. Whoever controls the majority of the board at the end wins.

    There are details missing there about things such as defining who controls the majority of the board, but with one exception (ko) that's really all the game is. Everything, all of it's depth, is a mathematical result. Interesting patterns emerge, comparable to things like prime numbers or pi. For example: From the rules I put above it should quickly become apparent that I could just surround the opponents pieces that surrounded mine, and my opponent could do the same. No piece would ever really be safe, or ever really be captured that could not be replaced. No rules had to be made to remedy this: go naturally has a system in place where pieces cannot be captured. It's just plain cool. (See: "eyes").

    For the most part, Go is not about brute-force reading so much as recognizing and understanding the patterns. I don't have to mathematically derive the formula for the area of a circle each time I need to calculate it - once I understand the concept I can retain it. Go is very similar. That's not to say there is no brute-force reading. For example: one of the interesting phenomenon in Go is the "ladder," which results in one player chasing the other across the board diagonally. The winner will be determined based on whose pieces (if any) are met along the way. As a result, people just read out the very simple pattern across the board rather than playing the whole thing out.

    Go isn't flawless. There is a situation (ko) which essentially breaks the game. It's comparable to where in Chess if both players repeatedly make the same moves the game becomes a draw. There had to be rules added to deal with this situation, and while they do add even more depth and change the way the game is played, it is an area where Go's awesome depth-through-simplicity is marred.

    I recognize that Chess does have some depth to it other than just brute-force reading. There are concepts like pinning which result from the rules, but they're far fewer and generally not as interesting. There's also many concepts which carry between the two, such as Go's sente/gote vs Chess's tempo.

    Go is less about reading than it is about understanding. This, combine with the cool patters and concepts which emerge, is why Go is better than Chess. This is largely opinion; someone who plays Go is not necessarily a better, smarter person than someone who plays Chess. It is possible for an intelligent, healthy, mentally-stable human to prefer Chess's convoluted rules, simpler concepts and overwhelming amounts of brute-force reading. They'd just be silly for it.

    --
    "A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire