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."
Playing chess is good for brain development. I recommend it.
These competitions explicitly prohibit the use of the above technique. This is because chess is already a 100% solved solution space. We already can make a player that will play the "perfect" game of chess - just that the above competition bans it. So now you have a whole bunch of computer programs attempting to optimally search said space in real-time without appearing to...its all rather ridiculous although still a challenge.
For that reason these competitions are not very interesting at all - just high publicity.
You may be more interested in the world of GO - which is still unsolved and recently had a very interesting article talking about a breakthrough. The solution space of GO is so large that the same "cheating" technique would never work in the foreseeable future.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/533496/why-neural-networks-look-set-to-thrash-the-best-human-go-players-for-the-first-time/
Its even possible that the solutions and tools for such pattern recognition problems could be more broadly useful in other areas of AI. (unlike almost all of the chess stuff most of which appears to be dick measuring for publicity at this late stage)