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."

Comments

Moore never said clock speed. 64 bit twice 32 bit

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Big Data for chess

[lucm]

I always wondered, why does it become evermore more pressing as we get closer to home? As my ass lands on the toilet it seems it couldn't have waited even one more second before exploding.

It's a manifestation of enantiodromia. In layman's terms, the sudden availability of the toilet causes a paradigm shift as the quest is now fulfilled; the subject decathects from his need for restraint but cognitive dissonance (or more accurately: an availability heuristic bias) usually misleads him into discarding the crossing of the motivational inflection point and to falsely believe that he couldn't have waited longer.