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Chess Terminator Robot Takes On Former World Champ
Zothecula writes with this excerpt from Gizmag: "For almost as long as we've had computers, humans have been trying to make ones that play chess. The most famous chess-playing computer of course is IBM's Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated the then World Champion Garry Kasparov. But as powerful as Deep Blue was, it didn't actually move the chess pieces on its own. Perhaps that's a trivial task in comparison to beating the best chess player of all time, but it's still exciting to discover this recent video of a chess robot that more closely fits the true definition of a chess automaton." My favorite part: "Note that around the 2:45 mark Kramnik extends his hand offering a draw, but the robot – since it's not fitted with any kind of optical device – just keeps playing, very nearly taking off Kramnik's hand in the process!"
Oh, it is.
It just doesn't understand surrendering. Terminators take no prisoners.
Chess plays you!
When Garry played Deep Blue, it was understood that no parameters of the machine would be changed during game play. That turned out not to be the case, as the IBM programmers were tweaking things behind the scenes.
Had Garry known this, he might have played differently, not expecting the machine to make new/different moves than it had previously made, etc.
Robot playing chess is one thing, but what will happen if you cannot make it stop playing games. We wouldnt want any more chess moves. Rules of chess need to be only slightly wrong and it keeps playing infinitely.
Cool, let's put two of these up against each other.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Kramnik decided to try and confuse the robot by putting a pawn between two squares, which seemed to work (the robot did nothing). He then fixed the location of the pawn and reset the timer. When the robot still didn't respond after a few seconds, he reached out to touch it and it started playing again.
=Smidge=
It must be annoying to have devoted a big part of your life to playing chess, only to have someone say "Well, we built this robot who can kick your ass in five minutes." I think when robots are better at my job than I could be, I would start to question the meaning of my life. Its worthy of an Ishiguro novel, or I guess, under the circumstances, a Dostoevsky.
These chess terminators they dont feel pity, or fear , or remorse and they absolutely will not stop until you are checkmated!
Is anyone else getting re-directed to Epoclick.com after clicking the link in this story?
A few days ago, sometimes when I click on a link, I get sent to Epoclick.com in a popup window. This has only been happening with Slashdot and links going to gizmodo or gizmag and only on this laptop. I can't figure out which website is to blame, or if maybe I have a virus or malicious javascript code running.
I think when robots are better at my job than I could be, I would start to question the meaning of my life.
In the 1980s, there was an article in Chess Life: "Computer Chess - It's Getting Serious". This was when computers started playing chess well enough that grandmasters had to take them seriously. One strong player wrote "I'm starting to feel like John Henry against the steam hammer". Now it's happened. Any good desktop machine can be loaded up with software that plays at world champion level for about $125. (If you haven't been on the cover of Chess Life, a laptop will be enough to trounce you.) People are still playing chess.
Work, though, is another matter. What's happening is the hollowing out of the middle class. There are more crap jobs that pay minimum wage, but fewer ones that pay more. Manufacturing used to pay well; now it pays slightly above minimum wage, if that. That's because the machines are doing the thinking. The workers are just robot hands with minimal skills.
Here's a very clear example of that - The Kiva robotic order fulfillment system. Watch that video. Hundreds of cooperating mobile robots. All the thinking and planning is done by the computers. The workers just take things out of one tray and put them in a box. The computers even control a laser pointer to point to the object they're supposed to pick. Then a bar-code scanner checks that they did it right. "Requires little or no operator training". Zero opportunity for advancement.
It was a drawn position, with the computer starting to shuffle the bishop back and forth. No point playing on. It did pretty well to hold Kramnik to a draw playing almost instantaneously.. engines usually play sub par moves at those kinds of speeds in my experience.. well it would still kick my ass, but this is Kramnik he's playing. Kramniks a machine himself. Also worth noting is i think Kramnik made a joke after he tried to trade off queens and the machine refused it. Kramnik is notorious for playing awesome in otherwise dry, queenless positions. Just ask Kasparov :p
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..
In fact, just finding and moving chess pieces around with a robot is orders of magnitude harder than playing the game of chess. We humans are just adapted towards these kinds of things (moving around in a 3D environment and manipulating objects) that it comes very easy to us, and we don't view it as a "hard" problem -- so when we see a game like chess, we think it is "hard" because we don't do it automatically. For a computer, which is well adapted for crunching numbers and doing logic, chess comes very naturally, while navigating a 3D environment and manipulating objects is not.
However, I can see that this robot is just a simple Denso manipulator without any perception, which makes the task significantly easier. But if you turned the chess board just 20 degrees to the right, it would utterly fail to continue playing chess, while the human would easily be able to adapt. Even if you provided sensors to the robot, that kind of change in its environment would be absurdly difficult for the robot to deal with.
Yeah, it was obvious he was primarily interested in the mechanics of how the robot arm interacted with the board and pieces, as opposed to seriously competing against the controlling computer's logic. He sacrificed a number of pieces to trivial captures by the computer's pawns for no reason at all.
I also thought the arm was moving unnecessarily fast, especially considering it apparently doesn't have any avoidance sensors.
Better known as 318230.
> I will be impressed when they make a cyborg
Yes, but not as much as you now think you will be - it is more likely to be an evolution than a revolution; it'll just be the amalgam of gradual advances in a dozen different fields.
It will still be a great thing, of course - the first fully functional synthetic organism; but we'll be more prepared for it than we'll ever be for first contact, for instance.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
WOPR: Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?
Terminator: Fuck you, Joshua.
When I read the headline I was hoping someone finally made a Chess Boxing robot.
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
English translation please? Also, what is with the pauses with clicks like camera shutters?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Is your name Vladimir Kramnik?" when you open the game.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
"Note that around the 2:45 mark Kramnik extends his hand offering a draw...".
=Smidge=
i think the fact that Kramnik offered his hand probably shows that the computer is the most human-like chess player theyve achieved to date (human symbolic gesture)
I don't know who you were quoting but I never said that.
It's obvious that he's reaching out to grab or push the robot, since it had not moved for some time. He was not trying to shake hands with it.
=Smidge=
The computers are beating Communists at chess now, next thing you know they'll be beating humans.
K.
Yawn. This robot has nothing on the competitors at this year's AAAI robotic chess competition. Check out a video of them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0Hx04KFCg. The main difference is that the robot featured in this post uses an instrumented chess board while those at the AAAI competition had to use computer vision and work with a variety of off-the-shelf chess pieces and board.
The first robot shown actually has the same RGB-D sensor that the Microsoft Kinect has and it won't move if there's a hand over the board.
Nothing new, the Mechanical Turk did it already more than 200 years ago.