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Gary Kasparov vs. The World
Shaheen writes "Gary Kasparov (world's greatest chess player) is once again doing something to mix technology with Chess. This time it's him against anyone and everyone. Basically, Kasparov makes a move, then the world - along with "expert" advice - votes which move to make. You can sign up here. " Interesting, but could chess be where some of Brooks's theories apply? Could throwing more people at the problem hurt instead of being beneficial?
This is like a SETI@home thing in a weird sort of way
Take a look at the world of chess, and try
to convice anybody that the grand masters aren't
greatly outnumbered.
If they do this, then they need to weight voters
according to their chess rating.
I will be absolutely amazed if the collective votes give Kasparov a decent game. This game will be as good as the expert advisors, whoever they are, and their ability to advocate their knowledge of the best move. The only thing that might make this interesting would be if 'the world' decided to build their own Deep Blue by farming out processor time. Given that this is basically a Microsoft publicity stunt, I doubt those who would be interested in doing something like that will.
At Half-Life of course.
Remy de Ruysscher (remy@cyberservices.com) is in the process of organizing programmers to build a distributed chess engine module to be used with the eventual distributed.net V3 clients. Feel free to drop him a line if you're interested.
Source: http://www.distributed.net/projects.html
If the human-conglomerate loses, what does that say about humanity when you consider one computer beat him?
p
Frankly, this is ridiculous.
And what's with these "Obviously a Seti@Home" comments? First, if your going to use a distributed metaphor, you should use "Distributed.net." It's been around much longer and was the inspiration for seti@home. Secondly, most chess games (including the Deep Blue-Kasparov match) are timed. Given a day, Kasapaov would have to be on drugs to lose.
The second-rated grandmaster lost to a K6-2 OC'ed with Kryocool. See: http://www.kryotech.com/articles/chess_release.as
I see this as an ego-booster for Kasparov. So he lost to a machine. He still won against many people at once.
This might be a little bit off-topic, but I'm a little curious about Kasparov's "world's greatest" status. Surely he's been doing the best at Grandmaster's tournaments for over a decade now, and I'm certain many ./ readers remember his Deep Blue fiasco..but in-my-own-humble-opinion(tm), Kasparov is really both a symbol and product of the sad state of modern chess. The reason I quit the circuit is that most games between masters, for those who don't know, really take place about 20 moves or so into the game, with an amazing amout of red tape (otherwise known as "opening book" moves) robotically played out before that. These exercises in repetition usually end up being a test of memory rather than raw playing skill or creativity--things that really *are* good for the game, instead of Kasparovian theatrics which clearly are *not*.
Consequently, the combined attentions of the world's chess community would only serve to help find the "right" move more expediently. I can't really understand how more than one person could effectively come up with the kind of mental plan or strategy that is required to beat--and usually even draw with--Kasparov and his gang of advisors.
Look forward to draw after draw, and probably a lot of bland, uninspired play on par with the Deep Blue games.
Sure it will hurt... Only stiupid americans will
beleve that having more people on the board and
voting will help anything. There is no logics
behind which should make the vote opt for the better move. Actually the vote will always result in some medicre move in chess, sice it will be the move proposed by many BAD players. And there
are more BAd ones out there than good ones.
Easy job for you Kasparow!
Like your operating system has much to do with Chess. Perhaps the best Chess players didn't use computers at all till now. Just because you installed trendy product X (Linux in your case), doesn't nessesarily mean you any good. Many people used to cheers MSFT just 5 years ago as much as they cheer Linus now.
Which is precisely why we should have each node on the internet evaluating moves made on Jan 7-8th!
Tom
Chess by committee - what an idea! :)
Wise old Unix fortune cookie says:
The IQ of a group equals the lowest IQ of all
members of the group divided by the number of people in the group.
Cheers,
Jay Ts
Anatoly Karpov vs. the world was played on the internet sometime in 1994/95. If I remember correctly, players from 76 countries participated, and Karpov won easily.
That particular match had an algorithm that took in the next move from The World and used whatever the majority suggested within a particular time interval. Obviously Karpov was easily going to win, since the composite average player isn't as good as a former world champion.
The concept is interesting, and I think it's fun to play, knowing you're entering a "micro move" against the champ. But ultimately it's easy to predict the outcome.
as relevant as the aibo's robotic lipstick penis. MATE!
Kasparov is not the "world's greatest chess player" this appellation goes to Deep Blue!
You'd expect a consensus of all levels of players to play very badly, but this does not appear to be the case. This kind of thing has been tried before, (by snail mail instead of the net) with the USSR public playing a hard faught match against Boris Spassky back in the days when he was world champion.
I think Kasparov will win, but it might be tough.
It won't fly because it isn't organized in a way such that adding more people makes them more effective. Its the old 'if you want someone who can high jump 8 feet, you get single athlete who can jump 8 feet, not four people who can jump 2 feet each.'
Thousands of poor to mediocre players will choose a poor to mediocre move - outvoting the handful of good to excellent players with superior but not obvious moves.
Any agreed strategy from the "world" is out of the window, but if a decent strategy emerges, and the adjudicators can ignore the noise, they could find new moves they hadn't considered, and are less likely to make a mistake *if* some form of comment is allowed with each vote. It's a sort of parallel debugging thing, I suppose.
ac.
This would happen if everybody's life was consumed with thoughts about microsoft. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Most people will have chess on their minds when they are thinking about this contest.
But you should write some conclusions connecting the chess match to MS. While you're at it, you may want to construct a framework for how every news is somehow related to MS.
That's not entirely true. In a tactical position (Sharp Sicilian, King Gambit), you can pretty much survive by playing tactically good/sound moves that slightly improve your overall position. Anyway "decision about goals and a commitment to them" is exactly what computer don't do, but they still play very decent chess nowadays.
Wow, - answering the starting color question!
I like it. It's one hell of a research project. I can just see the media misconstruing the statement "the white player always wins"
Actually, here in Sweden SVT (the national television company) used to have a chess contest just like this one a couple of years ago.
It was accomplished with a Java client - and as far as i remember it was quite good, and fun - but of course, the 'expert' won.
If 6 billion people was coordinated to go over a subtree of the possible futures moves, and report the best move they found, then you'd have something similar. In this case, it would likely help against Kasparov, but I'm not sure it would be enough... Exponential growth is a bad thing when you want to keep compute times low, even when the "nodes" are humans :-)
The choices may not be the "best" ones. But they are the choices people prefer.
I kind of like the Swiss model: An elected federal government, but with frequent popular votes on the most important issues after/b> the political parties has had a chance to make their position know. Those who don't care about the issue can either ignore it, or they can just vote the same way as whatever party they support, to play it safe.
But it also take a lot of power away from the elected officials, and give a corrective to them.
Additionally, it is a way for the elected officials to "solve" controversial issues, by leaving the choice to the people.
It's not perfect, but it's better than most other attempts at democracy.
Random noise also cause lots of innovative solutions, but it isn't good. Sure, you will get lots of innovative solutions from a vote, but chances are extremely high that they won't be the most popular one, since that would imply that the majority of the voters found the innovative solution instead of a glaringly obvious (and probably not so good) one.
I believe that chess is one of those problems where the tree to search is larger than the number of atoms in the known universe (or something ridiculously huge like that) :-)
So yes, storage of the intermediate results would be a bit of a problem
Daniel
But in the long run you still need a coherent strategy to choose the right thing. Computers don't have plans but (a) that's why all but the fastest ones are beatable by humans -- computers are bad at trimming implausible or unthematic moves off the game tree and get distracted by transitory tactical gains and (b) computers can get away with this because they calculate so quickly and examine *every possibility*. I doubt you'll get a higher search depth by having more people, both because no single person will be able to calculate that far and because a distributed system doesn't work so well when the nodes are working at cross-purposes or redundantly..
Daniel
>.. if you look at the goas curve 50%
Are you talking about the Gauß curve?
Maybe, but it's a far fetched conclusion to imagine there's a hidden "message".
When IBM sponsors the Olympics, it doesn't mean that the secret motivation is to hint that "Large bureaucracies can still succeed". Companies sponsor events all the time, it's good PR.
I don't know what makes you think of "Microsoft vs internet standards" when Garry Kasparov is playing chess against many people. It's a bit far-fetched.
You might as well claim that the *real* reason IBM sponsored deep blue was so that when it beat Garry Kasparov, it was IBM's way of saying "We can beat Microsoft!". But it's so weird a conspiracy you'd have to wear a loony cap.
re: "the white player always won"; who's to say that the white player really has an advantage after all, once all possible games are known?
That's exactly why Linux is such a mediocre product. Too many kooks.
The larger the group, the more collectively stupid it is. Why do you fail to see the relevance of this truth when applied to Linux?
Linux is not design by committee; it is design :)
by group consciousness and dictatorship.
- Jay Ts
Best Go program around is still only 4th kyu, and even *that* ranking is probably too high for it. They've still got a long way to go (sorry for the pun).m l
There's a really good paper at http://truth.wofford.edu/~kaycd/chess-go/index.ht
It compares the problems behind writing a go program with the problems behind writing a chess program, and has lots of nice statistics.
Hrm.. that page seems to have changed (or faulty memory on my part).. here is another URL to try, though not quite as comprehensive:C S-TR-339.html#3.1
http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/~jay/go/
11/19/99
The same problem applies to capitalism: the consumer is never aware of all of his choices, let alone all of the advantages and disadvantages of each choice.
Has anyone noticed that this is being run by the Microsoft Network? If you try to join the world team, it won't work under anything but Windows. This is because you have to sign up to MSN Gaming Zone before you can join, and the joining process uses ActiveX. It actually says on the joining page that it is for Windows users only.
The decision by anyone running this match to use the Microsoft Network's Gaming Zone was very poor indeed, as it shuts out people like Linux users. Surely it wouldn't have been that difficult to write a system using Perl, or even to use something like FICS (www.freechess.org). Something platform-independent, anyway.
I would have thought the organisers would have wanted as many people joining as possible, and making it Windows only does not go any distance towards achieving this end.
All someone needs to do is write a Seti@home like processor to play chess, and unleash the full power of the internet against Mr. Kasparov.
:)
That'll show him.
Building on your idea, I think a distributed chess computer would be very feasible and very fast.
It's simple: each computer would be assigned a different "prediction" of the moves that Kasparov and the computer are going to make. Then it would tell the server its conclusions about which move should be taken, assuming the predicted moves really are made.
The question is this: is there enough computing power in the world that every game could somehow be played out? One major problem is storage of the results of each game, but what if we had not only distributed clients but also distributed servers?
If there were some way to play out every game, it would indeed be possible to create the perfect chess player. Then we could discover whether there is a true advantage in being white or black.
Chess is not about playing "unexpected moves". Chess is about "outplaying" his opponent, by playing good, (or good enough moves). It is mainly not about creativity, but about deep and right analysis. Good players are sometimes creative, in that they play unexpected good moves, but that just comes from their analysis (either "innate" do to their experience, or due to calculation).
In fact, any good player, and Kasparov in particular, definitly "expect" all the good moves to happens. If you are playing and play unexpected moves, then either you have out-analysed Kasparov (not possible if you are a non-expert) or you are just playing a bad move.
I'd suggest you read "After the revolution?" by Robert A. Dahl, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale. It gives one of the best arguments I've seen about this issue.
In fact the problems mentioned above is in most countries today worse than they had been with a "perfect" democracy, since the election processes in most "democratic" countries favor the largest parties in such a way that they gain an even stronger positition than their support in the people (there are exceptions, but they are few).
You may argue that a politicians interests would be somehow "better" than a normal citizen. But I'd argue to the contrary: An elected official is "tainted" by being in a situation with above average payment, which make him unlikely to be sympathetic to the issues of the common man.
In addition, contrary to the people at large voting directly, the elected official would have to worry about his voters (at least during election time). He would be even more inclined to take the side of the majority, and ignore the minority, than what any single voter would be. A single voter has only his own interests to consider. The elected official has his own interests and/ the interests of the majority of the voters in his district to consider.
This means that minorities are a lot less likely to have any/b> support in an elected body, than they have in among the voters.
Which again mean that the chance of the elected body considering their case and supporting their rights are even smaller.
The elected bodies accountability to their voters actually reward ignoring minorities (we're not talking race or social position here, but people with minority opinions, allthough the two will often be the same). You might hope that different geographic concentrations might improve things. And in some way it might.
But all in all, indirect "democracy" only ensure that the majority have an even tighter control over the legislative.
Not that I don't advocate a perfect democracy everywhere. In the legal system, for instance, it would be inherently wrong, since the legal system isn't supposed to support the any faction, but is supposed to uphold what is really an "agreement".
Also, a direct "democracy" without any checks and balances would also be a problem, since it is open to momentary fluctuations in opinion to a great extent, and since it will mean the majority will always "win".
But worse than an elected body, elected with a process that strengthen the majority's hold? I don't think so.
MEEPT! finds this interesting, and suggests it should be run much like the open source community.
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"RMS, what do you suggest as the next move?" - ESR
"Chess sucks!" - dapslash loyalists
"It's NOT a move! It's a GNU/move. 'Move' is the actual act of changing location of a gnu/chess piece; whereas 'move' in the sense that you use it is the act of GNU/thought followed by a 'move'" - RMS
"Chess is great!" - slashcolon readers
"This sucks ass, we should make the board 3 yards wide and paint it green and purple" - Raster
"Chess sucks!" - slashdap extremists
"Chess? Did I try that and quit yet? *checks book-of-quit-things* Yup." - Bruce Perens
"I'm sure Redhat is behind this!" - dotdapslashists
"Can I buy a 10% stake in 'chess'?" - Bill Gates
"It's a Microsoft coverup!" - dotdilleslashdipdorks
"Well, I don't really understand chess..." - Linus
"1 C4|/| H4>0R Y0u!" - r00tshell script kiddies
"*bow*godhasspokengodhasspoken*bow*" - the masses
"'Chess' has been updated. Please download, recompile, reboot, and start again from the beginning." - Alan Cox
"FIRST POST!" - doddleslashers
"Um... where'd you freaks come from?" - Gary Kasparov
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MEEPT! would like to purchase movie rights to the above saga, and cast Larry, Curly, Moe, and Drew Barrymore in the lead roles.
MEEPT!!!!!!!!!!
This seems like a great time to plug FICS. (Free Internet Chess server). I have played "team games" there, which is somewhat similar, but on a much much smaller scale. I'm talking about games like 3 on 3 here. It was nice because we had some others to bounce of ideas.. Then again, we had a focused discussion. Not something the "world" can do very easily.
I noticed that this 'competition' is run on the MSN gaming zone, and is for Windows users only. This will eliminate just about everyone with an intelligence and chess ability that that could possibly approach Kasparov's own. This will obviously will tilt the game heavily towards Kasparov's favour, not that he needs to much help anyway.
Posted by Shady P:
This reminds of something an old, really old, retired IBM Software Engineer once told me. He said that IBM used to have this theory that if you put 100 programmers on a project it would be done 10 times faster than only having 10 programmers on the same project. How funny. With the same theory applied, the world should be 6 billion times better than Kasparov, assuming everyone in the world knows how to play chess and actually participates.
Posted by PasswdIs ScoreOne:
Chess is a good candidate for being split up into n small tasks. It compartmentalizes well. Each client could examine a small subtree of possible moves, assigning an heuristic value to the top of their tree node. Clients pass this value up the chain until the top client just picks the move with the highest value. Everything would all be happening in parallel, and should thus make for a very strong and very fast player.
Of course, if *one* client in the net dies examining what is really the best possible move, the entire distributed.net system will suffer. The only way out is to introduce redundandy (the same tree of moves may be processed by many people). But this chips away at the total possible maximum strength of distributed.net. But then, that's always the fundamental tradeoff isn't it?
Posted by ThickAsTwoShortPlanks:
From what I remember about the subject from AI class :
1) There's not enough copmputing power, or seconds in the universe to do an exhastive search on the tree. It's one *big* tree.
2) Throwing computing power at the problem helps, but not much (as you get less and less dividends for your extra effort.) More significant is better stratagies in working out how to work things out (if you see what I mean.) Computing power has doubles every 18 months or so, but the ability of computers to play chess has greatly surpassed that.
Later.
Mark.
So, if the world loses against Gary Kasparov, does that mean that we are collectively more stupid than Deep Blue? :^)
-- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
If everyone is voting on moves each day, any kind of planned strategy is out the window. I doubt he'll lose.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Quoth James Madison: (full document at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/fed_10.html)
Here are two of the most salient paragraphs:
To put it in more geek-friendly terms, compare the most popular of just about anythign to the best of just about anything. :-)
The most popular is almost always the inferior one, but with the best marketing given a large enough market.
For instance, Windows vs. (insert your religious choice here). The same can be applied to movies. Try watching the Independent Film Channel if you've got cable. They actually break the mold of the 8 different plots washed, rinsed & repeated by Hollywood.
Hmm.. maybe theoretically. :) Realistically, I tried like hell to get past the Go puzzle to see the last girl option in 11th hour (after 2 prior wins picking the wheelchair girl and the slutgrrl). No dice. ;)
Btw, anyone know what happens if you pick the one you were originally supposed to rescue?
However, unlike this game, it *would* be interesting to see a game between one very good player, vs. a team of good players, who all have talent for cooperation.
Internet standards aren't created by democracy. Unlike in ISO commitees, voting is rare and informal on IETF working groups. Instead, decisions are made by consensus. And, of course, those who do the work has the largest influence.
Well, we've seen how well a large group of people approached the "problem" of the storage capacity of the human brain -
(ROFLMAO)
I know, Gary Kasparov is Russian! He's gonna kick everyone's asses and use it as propaganda to show how stupid democracy is!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
See my post above :-) (or below..)
If you have 3 or 4 'experts' you're guaranteed to have an average of about 3 to 4 different overall playing strategies and 6 to 8 different ideas about how to play the next move. Especially in the opening, but at other times as well. And because a style of play is so habitual and ingrained, it's really really hard to play along with someone else's ideas -- if I were watching a slow positional game I'd keep trying to point out tactical disruptions that could be made. 3 or 4 'experts' (hopefully really GMs) could maybe work, since you'd have a small enough field of ideas that you could agree on one theme consistently. Problem is, you'll probably have more than that, not to mention the lesser players who want to chip in (with plausible ideas probably)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
[bafflement]
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I play chess. This will not work.
:-) But seriously, they'll have problems with conflicting styles of play; I doubt they'll even make it out of the opening [the beginning of the game for non-chess-players] without getting into trouble -- in fact the opening is the worst time since some people can be almost as religious about their decision of 'opening lines' (canned moves to start a game with) as computer users are about operating systems. [dunno if the best players are..] Imagine a FreeBSD user, a Linux user, and a Mac user working together to build a system from scratch, hardware and software, and you might begin to get the idea here :-)
The reason is that decisions in a chess game depend very much on one's own personal inclinations. Some people like elegant, slow games in which the object is to win by playing more thematic moves than the other player. Other people like to play lines which lead to muddled, knife-edge tactical positions in which it's unclear who will win. And of course the very best players will do both at once
A second problem is that good chess play requires a decision about goals and a commitment to them. This could be good of course -- if everyone decides on a goal together they can all agree on how to pursue it. However (see point 1) this is unlikely to happen -- if half the people decide they want to launch an all-out attack while the other half want to play a more strategic game, you could end up with a situation where the World is lurching back and forth between plans. And just two opinions about what should be done is unlikely -- you're probably always going to have at least 3 and at points where there are important decisions to be made you could have as many as 10 or 20 plausible moves. (and be assured that Kasparov will force his opponents to make as many decisions as possible -- even in normal chess this is good play..more decisions means more ways to screw up..but when your opponent is already not single-minded it is an even stronger idea)
In sum then: too many cooks will spoil the soup.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
But for real, how neat would this be? How about 2 competeing teams of distributed chess clusters? MacOS Vs. Linux? Linux Vs. Linux? Windows Vs. Palm? Heh... I dunno, if I ever get the willpower maybe I'll try to put it together, but I'd really rather someone beat me to it.
-- The unsig...
We're all very impressed. Not only did you hear about this first, you submitted it a week ago! you also thought of the witty title but you got no credit... Theft I tell you!
-- The unsig...
Remember, 100 is average.. He'd be slightly below average if he was 50 below.
First off, the chess game will take months to play. One move a day!? Second, a consensus of chess intermediates will suck compared to a single chess expert. That's why we have elected officials instead of having a popular vote.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I think he has the mindset that many folks here do, unfortunately. Need someone or something to rebel against. Hehe, in the 60s kids rebelled by getting high and sharing free love. Today's kids (at least today's geek kids), spend their time dissing MS. Oh well.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
For Kasparov that is....
Since only windows users can play he won't have to face the Linux community.
Ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
A good cracker could "Stuff the ballot" box with really crappy moves. Perhaps we could even lose in 5 moves!
Then the whole windows community would really look like crap.
Ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
That the average IQ of the Linux community is at least 50 points higher than the average IQ of the windows community.
Creativity is very important, drone.
Ken
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In case nobody knew. The way to determine the IQ of a group:
In other words, the larger a group, the more collectively stupid it is. Ever see a military formation marching? Very impressive for the most part, but incredibly stupid. Also explains why things designed by comittee (as opposed to mere approval) tend to be garbage (Divx anyone?).
Basically once a group exceeds 200 people or so, a slug has greater subjective intelligence than the group in question.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I never linked those pages from anywhere else or posted URLs anywhere that I recall. It's exactly the same idea he's got. I wonder if I said something to somebody and it got back to Kasparov? That would somehow be incredibly cool.
-- Old Man Kensey
I'm afraid not as they are all Windows users
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Lotteries are nothing more than a way to get stupid people to fund schools and other state projects.
(And yes I do play when the prize goes above $100 million, but I like to think of it as donation to schools rather than a chance at millions).
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
That would be so much cooler.
Set a date and time, make sure everyone's
clients are on at that time...
I think your parents should spank your prepubescent butt more often.
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Any analogy between this effort and the beneficial parts of parallel processing will most likely be wrong. The processing is uncoordinated so every compute node (person) must go through the same computations. Thousands of times more computing power with all parts geting about the same distance towrds the solution. The only benefit of this system is fault-tolerance, the stupid nodes get voted down.
The end result will be that the effective chess ability of the group will be the average (or slightly higher if they pay attention to the experts) of the group.
Start Running Better Polls
That would be the point. It's arbitrary, but it was infering that Chess (invented how many thousands of years ago) should have racial undertones... Or at least that is what the media would pick up on.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
The "world" team can never win if moves are decided by ballot. The reason for this is that there is no chance that enough people would understand the strategy and tactics involved, so most people would vote for bad moves.
Now here's the reactionary bit, and only half tongue-in-cheek... Why would a strategy that woudn't win a chess game be good enough to run a country? What are the chances that your average punter can make the best decision on macro-economics, ethics, or foreign policy? Does anyone out there actually believe that a bunch of glorified public entertainers, voted into power by the ignorant masses, desperate to keep themselves in kickbacks and armour-plated limousines could possibly be an optimal way to reach public wellbeing?
George Bernard Shaw once said that democracy is a method of ensuring that people are governed no better than they deserve. Someone else said that its a way to allow people to oppress themselves. I'm sure you can come up with enough issues to illustrate the truth of these statements yourself...
So here's my solution. Let's take over the world, and start an open source government. No secrets, no lies, no politicians. Every suggestion gets judged purely by merit, good ones percolate to the top, bad ones disappear. Since there is no presidential term, we could affoard to take the long-term view, since we don't need to please voters, we can affoard to make unpleasant but neccesary decisions, since people are judged by merit, we never need to suffer under an ill-informed decision again...
In short, Linus for president!
[aldo putting on his serious chess hat]
Yerm... I think you're wrong about Fischer and Capablanca. These guys were great geniuses, and their games were inspiring, daring and brilliant. But if one of these two (or any of the other great grandmasters of the past, for that matter) had to play Kasparov today they would lose badly. Even if they were in peak form. The reason is that chess is a different game from what it was even as little as twenty years ago. Today's grandmasters get trained in the latest and greatest advances in opening theory, and supported in analysis by computers and massive databases. The advances in opening theory alone would be enough to give a decisive advantage in something like half the games.
But I think that even if there was some way of comparing native talent, totally divorced from training and theory, the greatest player of all time is none of the three players mentioned.
Murpy would give them all a run for their money...
These sorts of games have long been a part of chess history. Depending on how the moves are decided, the consulting team can bring a lot of ingenuity to bear on the game.
A move a day is reasonably fast, so the game should stay interesting.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
Has anyone thought about writting a distributed client to come up with an entire game tree for chess? I mean, yeah it would be huge - but then wouldn't it be interesting to find out the exact paths to victory at every turn - or at least the most likely paths - no more fuzzy logic etc - or maybe I'm just talking out my ass...just a thought, though.
I'd like to see Kasparov against a distributed chess program ala distributed.net. Maybe we could get Deep Blue out of retirement for a match against a world-wide distributed chess program.
To be correct, 50% are below median, not below average (mean).
pooptruck
Off topic I know, but this thread isn't that deep. It's like asking who would win a race between a cheetah and a thousand people with their ankles tied together.
There are times when it is necessary to speak.
Bite the hand.
This is hilarious, in fact.
--
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The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
people can't do the type of parralel computing together, sorry. At least not the sort of computing that is necacery for chess. the voting method is stupid since the most common or obvious move to a large body of people will rarly be the best move.
also there will be no strategy and no cognative forward thinking. I don't see this working.
This problem also highlights one of the problems of democracy, actually.. if you look at the goas curve 50% of people are below average.. (still for governing contries democracy is the best known method out of all the other options..)
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( my music)
"It's like asking who would win a race between a cheetah and a thousand people with their ankles tied together."
definetly!
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( my music)
Yep, on the 1995 fall tour, a huge chessboard would drop out of the ceiling, and the band and the audience would each make a few moves. A chess player who was at one of the shows tells more about it here. I think it's the only time a rock (or jazz) band ever did this...;)
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
I think not.
I shutter to see this at the bottom of each page:
© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
010110000010110101010100011110010111000001100101
It appears this is only able to run on Windows. There doesn't seem to be a Linux equivilent for the plugin you need. If there is one out there, could you point it out to me? This sounds like a cool ides.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Isn't Bobby dead? If not - - this is what I would like to see happen. Or have Gary take on Deep Blue again. I bet he could take him in another contest.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Good. He's great at chess.
Doesn't anyone get tired of this sort of grandstanding? It would be an interesting experiment tho.
How many possible moves would there be on average for people to vote on? How long is the voting period per move?
I think that the human-conglomerate will lose, and I don't think it will say much about humanity, either.
Deep Blue was the product of a lot of work, time, and effort on the part of a great deal of engineers, computer scientists, and grandmasters. First, remember that Deep Blue was (is) a multiprocessor machine. All of this "Distrubited.net" stuff is basically what it did.
Even if we assume that all of these people everywhere each "examine" different moves, Deep Blue had something many people never had. It learned chess (the technique, anyway) from grandmasters. It had a library of grandmaster games that it could pick out situations from to see how a move might turn out. That is, it could take its current situation and see if it had happened before, what that grandmaster did, and whether that grandmaster won or lost because of it. It was also beta tested by playing games with current grandmasters and had its "style" refined through their comments and suggestions.
I've talked with the man who was in charge of the Deep Blue project; and I believe that generally Deep Blue has a lot of advantages that humanity doesn't (at least when it comes to chess). Considering that Deep Blue barely beat Kasparov the second time, humanity in this case stands naught a chance. (IMHO)
Well, the door was open...
This has some neat ramifications. If one assumes two things: one that people have something that a computer doesn't namely intuition, but a simple computer program can measure the "goodness" of two possible moves, then one should be able to combine the two. The plan then is that people submit their moves based on their intuition or whatever and then the computer finds the relative goodness of the moves. Spending more time on those moves that people think are "better" and less on those that people think are "worse." This way the computer benifits from the agragate skills of many people, but mantains that same computational power unique to it's breed.
Sounds like a good idea....
If Deep Blue can beat him, then why shouldn't thousands of people be able to?
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
Everyone here is smart enough to know a room full of monkeys will not beat Kasparov. But what if both sides are played by huge groups of (non-cooperating) players?
;-D
I saw a cool demo at SIGGRAPH where the left side of the audience played Pong against the right side. Each person in the audience had a colored "wand" that a was read by a computer on the stage in real-time. Each wand was binary, having two different colors. The computer would calculate a general consensus, either "move paddle UP" or "move paddle DOWN". This sounds chaotic, but the audience learned to play smoothly very quickly!
On a more frightening note, that SIGGRAPH demo also featured an audience consensus driven Flight Simulator! Imagine airlines down-sizing their pilots to save money: "We'll just let the passengers fly the plane using their general consensus!"
cpeterso
WOOO I was at that SIGGRAPH! I'm guessing it was 1992 or so.
As I recall, the pong game was much more successful.
This is a good analogy. You can play pong by consensus (and it happens to be a problem that can be easily parallelized) but flying a plane isn't.
Add me to the list of people who think chess by consensus is a completely braindead idea.
BTW. There were other cool things. They had an overhead graphical representation of what the pattern of red and blue was, and they had a little card that told you an order of things to do (just like at football game) so it would make pretty patterns on the display.
Also, at this Siggraph was the start of a war between graphic "artists" and graphic "scientists"
Up until this era, most computer animation was done like regular animation, where artists would interpret and dictate how a given character or object would move.
There was a group of less "arty" minded programmers that had started on using constraint based physical modeling to do the actual animation, with startling results. This pissed off many of the artists, who would rather animate say, a bowl of jello, by hand.
Needless to say, the constraint based jello model was frightengly convincing, wheras constraint based modeling of a human being walking was pathetic.
It was a great contrast.
No suprise. Microsoft owns the zone. Not that I would recommend boycotting microsoft funded events or anything.
OK... we watched Big Blue play against a person... we know the power (and lack of power) of a computer against a living chess master.
Let's battle it out against computers.... Big Blue vs. Internet based distributed computing. Heck, I would spare my idle CPU cycles for something like that. The best part is.... they could play for weeks... humans slow the process down. Once you can prove that some form of Internet based distributed computing can consistantly beat the super-computer, then we can take on a real person.
If Big Blue can't always beat a human, why should we trust distributed computing, unless you can prove it can beat the machine that lost to a human?
Just my $.02 worth...
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
I use windows
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
on the other hand, if we were to play aganst the worst chess player, we would win.... no question, democracy keeps the governement at a compitance/evilness level as the general public, while one person *may* be better, they may also be worse the current system, while horibly broken, is still better then that risk
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Now that I think about it, chess sucks ass... Go is so much cooler. it's amazing simple, and yet a million times more complex a computer cannot *thoreticaly* beat a human in go, I think...
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actually, it is known that a team of diverse approaches will come to more innovative solutions than a team of experts, who may all think the same way. The diverse team does want some experts, a team of total idiots is not the point here. The experts cannot beat Kasparov thinking as they normally do. So perhaps some unexpected moves by the non-experts will put them in positions they are unused to but that they can then actually leverage to beat Kasparov.
Exactly how each move is decided, and how much planning and discussion goes on, will have a huge impact on whether the team can actually win. But if done properly, I think they have a chance.
As someone noted earlier, a single grandmaster would probably be more of an opponent than "the world", but away from "serious" chess, he got mentioned in the newspapers again.
(NT)
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
How about having the plug-in shared as source?
The page says my Netscape 4.07 is 16-bit.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Plug in source!
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
It said Netscape 4.07 is 16-bit!
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
I'm in hell. Bellboy get my luggage.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
No text
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Go represents what I think of intelligence the fewer rules you need to maintain a feedback loop the more intelligent and power the entity is.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Get teams of programmers for the distributed client. And then see which programmers come up with the best chess program.
The besides a Mac team vs. a Linux team, you could have Gnome vs. KDE teams or vi vs. emacs teams, etc.
If you know a thing or two about democracy then you know that the general public and its opinions are STUPID. It's quite obvious who is going to win (Kasprov you idiot).
Let's say that a bunch of retards decide to take part in the game. Their votes will then affect the decision. Now, let's say a bunch of grandmasters also take part. Their votes will affect the decision. And undoubtibly, the majority of people won't be retards and they won't be grandmasters.
The decision, therefor, will be that of an average person. So, in a sense, this is a match between an average person and the world's greatest chess players.
he'll win, because all of my personal chess skills will be voting against him. With that and a million more bozos like me, what chance will the experts have?
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Here in the Netherlands (and I suppose in other countries as well), there have been matches like this forever. The matches are played in radio programs and people call in to cast their vote. Now of course internet is better suited for something like this, but the idea is very old.
It was five of us at a friend's house one night. He (the acknowledged best player, but not by that much) put up eight dollars to our two bucks each. I put in money to make it interesting, but refused to play because I realized we had no chance. Surprisingly, they were doing pretty well into the late midgame. Then they had a tricky situation with a bishop. It turned out that each of the four of us were suggesting a different move; we finally decided on my choice, and then the single player got us with a simple bishop fork that somehow none of us noticed and we lost a rook. So much for that game. We were so busy aruging about which move to make, we missed an obvious fork.
Like the rest of you, I think this Kasparov thing will be a total failure with an easy win for GK. Although the site said something about the moves being suggested by GM's... If that's so, and people get to vote amoung four good moves, it might last a while. GK will still win, but it at least might take a while.
If the world allowed to cheat, resurrect "Deep Blue", load it up with the latest and fastest PowerPC chips, and let it think about each move for 24 hours? That's "our" only chance of beating Mr. Kasparov! Of course, I would still bet on Kasparov with 24-hour moves. A committee (voting, no less!) stands no chance at all.
;)
Disclaimer: this opinion is based on the vast (heheh) knowlege of chess I acquired gradually learning to beat "Mr. Jett" as a teenager in the downtown library. But mostly what I learned is that when you regularly start to beat someone, they stop showing up.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Microsoft WANTS Gary to Win.
Why?
Simple.. think about what that would prove -- one person who knows what he's doing and can execute freely is better than a million people who have to decide by commitee.
Microsoft is making a statement about the way Internet standards are created. Their message is clear: Trust us to make the standards. We can do it faster and better than any committee.
Microsoft Windows is one of the base requirements for participation in the Zone.
this seems a bit predictable to me. the result will undoubtedly be that kasparov will win in a firly high but not huge number of moves. there is virtually no danger of either the "world" team winning, or having a particularly interesting game, as the vast majority of people following this game will be patzers who will pick a random move recommended by one of the analysts. the moves will all be safe, and predictable.
i don't believe that a group of people will ever be likely to beat the world champion. even a small group of grandmasters has a worse chance than any single one. it's a hallmark of top-level chess to make and execute a plan, and as soon as there is any on-board indecision about the plan, there is a weakness to exploit. multiple grandmasters are far more likely to have indecision about their plans than just one.
when i first heard the offer, i thought that it was going tobe kasparov playing an unlimited-game simul. which would be a Good Thing. especially since one of my coworkers pointed out that he could save a lot of time, especially in the beginning, because there would undoubtedly be a lot of people making the same first move, and then a lot of those people would make the same second move, etc.
--seamus
If this is a vote by email, it stands a much higher chance of being a truly challenging game for Kasparov. After a few days, anyone thinking of stuffing the box will probably get bored and cease such activites (ruling out most non-enthusiast players). Being the start, it'll probably proceed with standard openings anyways. If it's on the web, forget it. Someone, sometime, will spoof the box to kill the whole project (I didn't see any info on how the votes would occur, and I'm NOT signing up for a mailing list). Out of curiousity, anyone notice that this rather odd idea is from everyone's favorite place? MSN... Knowing MicroShaft, in it's eternal brillance, this will most likely be an open web vote. I hope Kasparov enjoys the game...
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
This nicely illustrates the core problem with Microsoft. Whereas IBM tries to beat Kasparov by investing millions in devloping a sophisticated piece of hardware and software, Microsoft invests millions in hyping a product that was invented elsewhere (the internet) and probably wont work all that well anyways.
;)
Or, for the conspiracy theorists out there, Bill is just trying to shake general belief in democracy for the sake of eventually turning the U.S. into his own despotocracy
this sounds like a good argument against democracy... it's like one side has to play chess just between themselves before they can decide on the best move... i vote for Plato's philosopher king. I'm sure Kasparov will win, and in far less time per move.
The BBC tried this as an experiment a few years ago with a single experimental programme on Prime time television. One grand master (I've forgotten who) vs. everybody else. People phoned in their move after a chess "expert" discussed the best avaiable options. Every move the option with the most votes was used.
The single grand master won hands down. It was embarrassing. There was obviously no coherent strategy just a lowest common denominator. A good example of why even a democracy needs an executive branch.
Wouldn't it be cool if reclusive chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer actually ended up playing as one of the "peons"? Or better yet, if all this voting crap (that probably won't work anyways) was just a ploy to let him play Kasparov without the world knowing it?
Which effectively removes the majority of innovative and creative thinkers from competition
Dangit again!
: There are two kinds of people; the kind that knows there are two kinds of people, and the kind that are wrong.