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The New (Computer) Chess World Champion
An anonymous reader writes: The 7th Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC) has ended, and a new victor has been crowned: Komodo. The article provides some background on how the different competitive chess engines have been developed, and how we can expect Moore's Law to affect computer dominance in other complex games in the future.
"Although it is coming on 18 years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, humans are still barely fending off computers at shogi, while we retain some breathing room at Go. ... Ten years ago, each doubling of speed was thought to add 50 Elo points to strength. Now the estimate is closer to 30. Under the double-in-2-years version of Moore's Law, using an average of 50 Elo gained per doubling since Kasparov was beaten, one gets 450 Elo over 18 years, which again checks out. To be sure, the gains in computer chess have come from better algorithms, not just speed, and include nonlinear jumps, so Go should not count on a cushion of (25 – 14)*9 = 99 years."
"Although it is coming on 18 years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, humans are still barely fending off computers at shogi, while we retain some breathing room at Go. ... Ten years ago, each doubling of speed was thought to add 50 Elo points to strength. Now the estimate is closer to 30. Under the double-in-2-years version of Moore's Law, using an average of 50 Elo gained per doubling since Kasparov was beaten, one gets 450 Elo over 18 years, which again checks out. To be sure, the gains in computer chess have come from better algorithms, not just speed, and include nonlinear jumps, so Go should not count on a cushion of (25 – 14)*9 = 99 years."
Playing chess is good for brain development. I recommend it.
Another excellent article on how computer chess has progressed since the time of Deep Blue is here
http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-1-2
I would be curious to see how an algorithm based on millions of actual games fares against a pure mathematical model. "Based on your interest in taking queens with a pawn, you might be interested into taking a bishop with your rook".
lucm, indeed.
I don't know about the chess championship, but that is one of the best blogs on the internet. Where did it come from? In a world of 7-second attention spans, "you won't believe what happens next....", and pop culture domination, here is a guy who is talking about math, computers, and games in a friendly relaxed manner, because it is interesting to him. He talks about Godel (who apparently said, "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not"), some recent ideas in information theory, and a comparison between linear algebra and quantum computing. He uses LaTeX.
Also, from the post I learned about a game called Arimaa, which was designed to be hard for computers but easy for people. There is a bet that no computer will be able to beat a human, and you can win thousands of dollars if you do. So far it's apparently not even close. Also, got this great quote: "It’s not that chess is 99% tactics, it’s just that tactics takes up 99% of your time."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
but Moore's law clock speed doubling has been dead now for more than a decade.
You might want to check your assumptions before making any more sweeping predictions of future performance.
Because really, the fact that a computer can beat the best human players at chess just by analyzing millions upon millions of board combinations is no more surprising than the fact that even a small child can figure out how to never lose when playing tic tac toe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So when will these chess playing programs attain general artificial intelligence on par with a human? With each improved player, we must surely be getting closer...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Moore never said anything about clock speed. He said the number of transistors. A CPU with more transistors can compute a complex problem faster. There is a science to trying to come up with problems that aren't solvable faster with more transistors (even at the same clock), but those problems are rare in the real world. Today's 3Ghz processor is faster than a 3 GHz processor from five years ago.
Recently, the big improvements have come from organizing the increased transistors into increased cores. Today's 8-core CPU can analyze eight moves at once. The older dual-core system could only analyze two moves at once. Therefore, the 8-core system is four times as fast, on a parallel problem like this.*
* Actually even better than four times, because a fractional core is needed to manage the overall process. The dual core chip could analyze 1.5 moves simultaneously, the 8-core can analyze seven simultaneously.
I wonder if there is a difference between the best engine at beating other engines and the best engine at beating humans. Obviously, you need to put them on low powered machines to bring them down to the level of occasionally losing to humans to check.
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There are now much, much better games than chess for "brain development". Chess still has a cultural value, but that's about it.
Royally!
There is a science to trying to come up with problems that aren't solvable faster with more transistors (even at the same clock)
It's not hard, anything with linear dependencies. If you have to solve step A before moving on to step B, then it doesn't matter how many cores you have, they all have to wait until step A is solved.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Come on, everyone say Yippppeee for everyone else! Yipppeeeee!!
Then again, I beat a computer at kick boxing once.
Not original, I read that somewhere not 30 minutes ago.
It is late so
Good night to all and to all a good night!
nah!
Good Yiiippppeeeee to all and to all a good Yiiipppeeeee!
That's more like it folks!
You mean like what the runner up is already doing? http://stockfishchess.org/get-...
Solving chess also benefits from bigger memories for transposition caches. Multiple cores help too. So, Moore's law certainly helps chess engines. But it's not just the hardware that has improved since Deep Blue. There has also been tremendous progress in the engine software. Especially the technique of letting the computer play millions of blitz games against itself helps to tune the many evaluation parameters has been very successful in improving engine strength.
Even that is coming to an end, with the end of Denard scaling. You can still double the number of transistors on a chip for a fixed investment, but you can't double the number that you can have powered at any given time. That's why accelerator cores and things like dedicated AES instructions have become common: its worth spending some transistors on things that speed up a single algorithm or class of algorithms.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you have to solve A before B, you can work all possible A in parallel, then all possible B in parallel. More cores is better.
Also, just because you have to solve step A before you can solve step B doesn't mean you can't START working on B, such as solving B for likely values of A, storing them in a lookup table, then selecting the precomputed answer from A. In fact I won a prize doing exactly that with my software playing a game against humans.
>. It's not hard.
Harder than it first appears, we just demonstrated.
I am disappointed to see only one mention of late Don Dailey in TFA. He is actually the guy who wrote the whole thing. I had followed his posts for years in computer go mailing list. I have learned a lot from him as an R&D engineer in an unrelated field (chemical industry). While many people adopted "improvements" only because it made sense to them, Mr. Dailey had a very systematic and methodological approach to changing the program. He had ideas and insights for improvement like many others, but he never fell in love with his own ideas. If something did not work, it did not. No matter how plausible it seemed. He also had most patience I have seen of an online person. He would carry on discussions long after it was obvious the other party was not paying enough attention or was simply stupid. He did this almost to the day he died.
Congrats Mr. Dailey. You have done it.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
PS, the other thing I did (successfully) was pre-compute symmetry of A and B, so I knew that any value of A in this list would give the same result in B. So I didn't have to compute the value of B, after I knew A I only had to select which bucket it was in to get the value of B.
I kind of like their version of "Roll Over Beethoven".
Harder than it first appears, we just demonstrated.
I'm not going to write a full proof. If you can't figure it out based on what I wrote, you are a moron.
Clearly however, you can figure it out, because you are reasoning about the topic clearly. You just like to argue.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>. I'm not going to write a full proof
Of course you're not, because you'd be trying to prove that it's impossible to do the things that we do all the time. I just showed that you're OBVIOUSLY wrong, so it would be pretty silly to try to write a formal proof otherwise.
When you discover that an idea you once had was mistaken, you can either a) get butt-hurt or b) learn something.
komodo won but it has been the main contender with stockfish for a while. I think it has been number two in the last two or three tourneys
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Stockfish is only slightly weaker, and is open source.
What's the point of closed source chess engines when a lot of engines are already far stronger than humans? Who's going to pay the money for a closed-source chess engine? Idiots? A grandmaster may want it to study its playing "style", and chess algorithm researchers might want it to study it, and other chess engine designers might want it to reverse engineer it, but there's no practical reason for even a strong chess player to buy chess engines anymore.
However for me it's harder to play shogi than chess. suplemen fitness murah jual suplemen fitness