Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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!