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 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."