I picked up a kit from Time-Warner cable here in Manhattan and set it up myself. I never took the included "Road-Runner" CD out of the envelope and I installed nothing. Plus, I run it through a router and firewall. No desire to risk their security sharing my files with a few thousand fellow subscribers.
Long before internet gaming, serious RPG addicts were paying real cash for things that didn't exist even on hard drive somewhere in Texas. Giant gaming cons would see people offering cash under the table for other members of their gaming group to have their character/s give them weapons, etc. Since you could also leave a sort of will in many cases, there was often deals of the "buy me lunch and I'll leave my mace of +4 against zombies to you when I die."
This came of age with the net, of course. Ebay finally had to ban (or just regulate?) the sale of virtual property after several Ultima-related fiascoes caused bad publicity. Katz wrote about before that here: 'Ebay launches virtual property' and there was quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this.
While looking for that coverage I found this essay on Gaming Culture that mentions Ebay. Also a mention on USA Today. Apparently the selling violated the games' terms of use.
Gee, two chess threads in one week, I'm thrilled. But then as a chessplayer I love thrills, apparently.
It is eternally amusing to me to see Americans immediately start several chessplayers=geek threads the first thing the game is mentioned. I generalize, but they inevitably turn out to be Americans since it is about the only place in the world where such a view prevails. Even so it is a remarkable contradiction since in no other culture is chess so consistently used as a positive metaphor. Dozens of commercials use chess and chess imagery to symbolize intelligence and strategic planning. Every Hollywood movie and TV show that wants to not-so-subtly demonstrate that a character is brilliant and cultured slaps a chessboard - usually set up wrong - in his den or has him playing.
The 'chess is for geeks' model in the US is then most easily explained by envy and fear, much the way people who don't know anything about computers denigrate those who do. The old 'scribble scribble scribble' method of squeezing sour grapes. But in general most people I meet in the US are impressed and/or fascinated by the fact that I work for Garry Kasparov and am a master level player myself. No, I didn't get beat up in school for starting a chess club in my California high school. (At 1.95m that wasn't much of an issue.)
In Europe and South America chess and other 'brain games' receive both attention as sports and respect from the public. In the US - a country that has oxymoronic basketball scholarships - on the other hand, there is a tendency to want to believe that any sport worth the name must involve blood loss. (They conveniently ignore the various tubs of lard who play first base.)
The incredible level of concentration reached by Grandmasters is on par with that needed for any peak performer in any sport or art and the same goes for the amount of energy expended, although it is not as quantifiable in drops of sweat. Take a good look at a player before and after a week or two of professional chess and you'll see what I mean. Weight loss of ten kilos is not unusual and physical conditioning is critical for top performance. Most players begin to decline on the rating list by the time they pass 32 years of age, similar to professional sports like football. (There is only one player in the top 10 over that age and only one in the top 20 over 40 years old.)
As touched upon in the article that started the thread, chess is in many ways a thrilling and even violent game. Much like boxing, it is purely mano a mano; there are no teammates to blame, no wind that wasn't blowing your way, nothing but your ego on the line. Losing can be absolutely crushing, and to excel you must build up an ego on par with those possessed by other pro athletes. (Yes, they even refer to themselves in the third person sometimes.)
It can take months or even a lifetime to recover from a bad result. Even an amateur can have a missed chance or bad loss stick in their brain for years. You don't hear too many people going on about some pickup basketball game they lost 10 years ago, but this is common in chess. The psychological elements are extremely powerful, and the history of damaged individuals in chess do not only illustrate the attraction of chess for introverts and others with everything from quirks to acne to serious psychoses. These anecdotes also show the power of the game to affect people who were quite stable to begin with.
In short, chess ain't for sissies. Those who insult chessplayers are usually those who don't have suffient self-confidence to play it themselves. (Apart from people who just have no interest in it, of course.) In a culture that says chess is for smart people you have to come up with some sort of reason to explain why you aren't good at it. "It's for nerds," isn't a good one, but it appears to still be around.
I know lots of top chess players who wouldn't strike you as particularly intelligent otherwise. While chess employs many faculties that make up the amorphous term 'thinking,' there are also chessplayers who fail their math classes, don't like to read, and vote Republican.
Hello there. The biggest specific eval problem programs have right now is that of 'closed' positions. The strategies involved when there is a locked center are so distinct from when the center of the board is open that many of your evals much actually change if your program is going to make decent moves in these positions. You almost need three programs. (Multi-engine programs are common, but knowing when to switch is the tricky part.)
All the knowledge you put in is general. Programs value bishops over knights, but in many specific positions, knights will be stronger. A master knows this, a program has a very hard time recognizing the patterns that make this true. (And then recognizing when they are no longer present. The next step is then to realize that the other player can create these conditions. This is why humans still win regularly.)
This is why databases tuning is practical, but trying to find a perfect eval is not. The weights in the eval have to change dramatically based on structure, so a perfect program would be able to do this. No matter what the best average static eval values come out to be, they will never produce a perfect eval compared to a human or program that can adjust on the fly.
Most of Deep Blue's tweaks during the match were more to keep Kasparov on his heels than to actually fix something they really thought was wrong. There is no way you spend years on an eval with Grandmaster consultants (not weak ones) and then decide after one game there is something that needs to be changed. But professional chessplayers survive on analyzing their opponents, and Kasparov basically played a different opponent each day, which wasn't exactly kosher. But don't get me started on that, either.
There is still a great deal of debate whether or not Deep Blue was a stronger chessplayer than the top PC programs are now. Its potential was of course enormous, but various advances have made the current generation very strong. Deep Blue played so few publicly available games that there is no way to objectively point to a move or a game and say that a current program wouldn't have done as well or better. This isn't helped by how Kasparov played absolutely horribly during most of the games.
There have been many experiments in learning programs and most of today's top programs have at least a limited form of this.
Mostly it is simple database modification. Programs play the openings (the first 10-20 moves, usually) from massive databases of hundreds of thousands of games (human games) and variations. This is called the opening book. As bizarre as it might sound, chess programs don't usually 'think' at all in the first dozen moves or so; they simply play what's recommended in their book of human games. (Which sometimes leads to freaky events.)
When a program with book learning loses a game, or even gets a very negative evaluation during it, it will downgrade the evaluation of that opening line in it's book, so it won't play it again. This is why you can't just repeat an entire winning game against program again and again. (This is very hard to do even if the program doesn't have book learning. The timing has to be perfect and they usually have some randomizing algorythm either in the book, the engine, or both.)
Having an engine play endlessly against itself to learn and improve works to a certain extent. But remember that you run into a serious time factor. If those are two hour games, say, the quality of the moves will be lower than when the program plays a four-hour game in a tournament. So something it put down as good may turn out to be bad. And at longer time controls you'd need years to produce the quantity of checked variations to produce something practically useful.
But programmers do do what you say to test and tweak new versions. If your new beta isn't beating your old gold you need to find out why. Remember, however, that this doesn't necessarily produce a program that is much stronger overall, but one that is stronger than the other one. And when you increase the scope by introducing other engines and versions it again becomes very time-consuming.
This is why they use test suites of chess problems and just check to see which version scores best.
Most of the top programmers work in conjunction with professional players (Grandmasters) to 'tune' their opening books. This is not only weeding out bad lines but creating a book that will help the program get positions that it plays well. Many openings played by Grandmasters are completely incomprehensible to programs, while the comps play certain types of positions better than any human ever could.
Don't sweat it, I'm used to anonymous loons. (This one certainly doesn't work for us; our technical staff is Israeli and they all know me quite well. I worked there on the site design for seven months pre-launch.) I still cruise by the chess groups in the Usenet but am inevitably flamed as having gone over to the dark side for working with Kasparov. (I used to just write columns in my spare time on several sites.)
I'm also 'vice-president of content,' but that's just a typical late-20th-century dotcom title. Ahh, back when everyone was at least a VP. If ya don't believe me I'll mention/. in my next editorial...
Hmm, where to start. My name is Mig Greengard and I run Garry Kasparov's website. I work with Shay Bushinsky, who is one of the programmers of Junior, the current world microcomputer chess champion. Just leaping at a chance to karma whore in my specialty. Let me cruise through the various questions and misperceptions I've seen so far.
This is an online tournament held in the biggest online chessplaying site, the ICC. The games are "60 + 10" time control, meaning each computer gets 60 minutes on its clock and 10 seconds are added for each move. So games can last up to 2.5 hours, tops. If you think this is long, this is what we call "rapid chess." Classical games can last up to seven hours.
Uniform hardware has pretty much been given up. They still distinguish between microcomputer and massive machines like those at NASA and Deep Blue, but everything is pretty much wide open these days. The programmers try to get the best hardware they can and usually know very well which platform is best for their program. (There WERE hardware chess accelerator cards, by the way. Back in the 80s when RISC and dedicated chess processors had better cost/chess performance ratios than CPUs. This hasn't been true since the Pentium, although various "Deep Blue on a chip" initiatives exist, including one by a member of the DB team.)
Anyone with a Slashdot account automatically forfeits the ability to call anyone else a nerd.
Move lists and online replay are both available on the site in the original post and at the ICC. Move lists are called "PGN" (portable (or player) game notation") which is an ASCII format used in databases but can be printed out and read easily if you know algabraic chess notation. Online java game viewer applets are quite common.
Both Shannon and Turing spent quite a lot of time on chess algorithms. Shannon actually wrote the first chess program before a computer existed. He 'ran' the program using slips of paper and generated moves this way.
The chess programming breakdown already posted is pretty good. The key concept these days is brute force speed versus knowledge. 20 years ago most programmers thought you needed to make the thing somehow think like a human because the brute force method was so slow. Intel and Moore won. The "fast searchers" now dominate thanks to the minimax algorithm. It just looks at one line after another and counts the beans to rapidly prune. Programs differ to an extreme degree in the amount of knowledge they apply. (HIARCS, for example, is one of the few "slow" programs at the top. It applies a lot of knowledge and looks at maybe 1% of the number of positions the fast programs like Fritz and Junior check.) A top level program, and the top 5-8 are roughly equal at a given time, will look at over one million positions per second. This sounds like a lot (well, it is a lot), but it only puts the program at a level equal to a top 100 level player at a classical time control. (At faster time controls, particularly blitz games of just minutes per side, computers are lethal. Humans just can't play mistake-free chess at that speed.) A program will look six-eight moves deep on the average, but extension will dive deeply into promising or unclear lines, sometimes up to 20 moves in a middlegame position.
Those who think chess is solvable should speak only theoretically. The number of positions is one of those great "million times the number of stars times the grains of sand in the world" numbers. The current method of tree and pruning adds less than one full move of search depth when you double processing power (node count). So the diminishing returns are very much here. The game of go is even worse for comps. Top programs still can't touch the human masters. Back-solving chess using massive databases starting with just a few pieces has had a big impact on computer chess in the past decade. Invented by Ken Thompson (yes, that Ken Thompson), endgame tablebases can now play any combination of five pieces (and many combinations of six) perfectly. This leads to humorous situations of a computer making optically stupid moves to reach a tablebase position it knows for sure is a mathematical win. (Tablebases allow the once-fantastical announcements of things like "checkmate in 45 moves.")
Most of the top commercial programs ARE playing in this event, but most people, particularly chess-ignorant Americans, only know Chessmaster. Fritz, Junior, HIARCS, and Shredder are all top commercial programs. In the chess world, Fritz is almost synonymous with chess program. Chessmaster has a very strong engine (called The King) by a well-known Dutch programmer. Various versions of The King have participated in these competitions and done just fine. Chessmaster has no reason to put its name brand on the line in these bloodbaths. An open tournament like this of only 11 rounds is not at all scientific, for one, but there mostly it's that since all these programs are so strong the power of the engine really isn't the most relevant thing when an amateur buys a chess program. Features like training materials, game databases, GUI, and graphics are much more relevant. Any decent program will kill you on even a low level unless you are an expert.
There are dozens of places to play online, and most of them have computer players as well. KasparovChess has multiple versions of the champion program Junior running and a new one generates when someone starts a game with one so you can always give it a try. (It's a dumbed-down version or it wouldn't be much fun.) The sites with the most players are, inevitably, Yahoo! and MSN. Their software and community suck, of course. Location, location, location. Of the specialist sites, the ICC, chess.net, and KasparovChess.com (my site, as disclosed above) are the largest and best. They have downloadable client software and administrated communities as well as live events, lessons, etc.
There have been many attempts at the holy grail of a massive online tournament. The biggest problem is simply cheating using these programs we're talking about. I could go on for a few dozen pages about methods and countermethods for catching cheats, but basically it's impossible at the end of the day. Don't get me started. KasparovChess hosted the first super-tournament to be played online, in the beginning of 2000. We had human observers with each Grandmaster, all over the world. We also hosted the largest online tournament so far, the world school chess championships. Thousands of kids from hundreds of schools around the world played. (Gotta trust the kids and teachers, right? Right? Actually there were several accusations made, but no decent cases.)
Yes, the ICC used to be free, and that free internet chess server (FICS) is still alive and well, although it is rapidly losing market share. There was a long and bitter battle about that split and the use of the FICS kernel, which is the foundation of just about every chess playing site in the world.
We cover top computer chess events, of which this one really isn't, but if you want to browse around some start here, at the last world championship. WMCCC
It sounds funny, but in the computer championships they have to play face to face and the programmer himself has to make the moves. The worry, of course, is HUMAN cheating, that is, a strong human helping the computer in an online event. The wisdom of a human Grandmaster combined with the accuracy of a computer program would be a devastating combination. (They have competitions of this, with GMs using computers while they play. It's called 'advanced chess' and was introduced by Kasparov. It's interesting, but not always dramatically superior quality chess.)
You can also stop by and play for free, either with an account and a rating or as a guest. We have a java applet if you don't want to download and install. We also have a lot of "learn to play" materials if you are one of the sad crowd that think it's just another board game.
When particularly motivated, usually when the 'remove' address proves bogus, I'll go to their site and whois the URL. Then I'll forward the spam, often two or three per day, to the contact e-mail addresses found there with a brief explanation. Sometimes I even sign them up for p0rn newsletters, not that I would know where to find those.
The typical e-mortgage spams lead to an URL registered to a casino company. They'll probably enjoy the newsletters.
Spooky timing. Just this week I got an e-mail from Paypal saying that I had sold something to someone involved with credit card fraud. According to the very lawyerly doc, I had 72 hours to send them MY SIDE of the story (?) to qualify for their Seller Protection Policy. I also had to meet a six or seven other requirements, most of which I assumed were handled by Paypal. (How would I know if I shipped to his verified credit card mailing address or not!? He was a "verified buyer" according to PP.)
So I get 700 characters to tell them that the guy had said the item arrived broken (see UPS thread here for that) and I should file a claim and send him the money. I offered to take the item back and give him the money back, he declined. (Now obvious why.) UPS kept saying things were being investigated and I haven't followed-up very often.
I go through the Paypal form (no other contact permitted, they make this quite clear). Then I log into my account to find they have debited the $1800.00! I don't keep much money there, mostly for impulse E-bay items, but it's gone now. I have received no communications from them at all.
Basically they seem to try to pass the fraud buck along to the seller if at all possible even though the breakdown was clearly on their side. It's even worse because like most people I never would have dealt with such a transaction without Paypal's supposed verification and protection. So they are just facilitating fraud if their protection is no good. This review process had better be simply nominal or I'm going to pitch a fit.
I sold a server on Ebay and had it packaged at a "Mailboxes Etc." in Manhattan and shipped UPS to Pennsylvania. The person who got it says it looked like it had been dropped from at least four feet, enough to crack the entire (metal) case. I had bought insurance, and UPS sent someone over to the guy's house to examine it. They have to make sure it was packed to spec or they blame the sender (Mailboxes Etc. in this case).
Despite their basically admitting it was damaged during shipment and that it was packed correctly, this was over two months ago and I'm still waiting for something to happen. They don't give me a point of contact so I have to start from scratch every time I call. Total mess.
Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds"? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...
You were expecting Miss Piggy?
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
Slander the man if you will, but at least Bert is kosher, and/or the Islamic equivalent!
I thought about that, that's why I said efficiency and not speed. I type much faster than what voice-recognition can handle these days, and probably faster than anyone can speak at a comprehensible level. But it's extremely inefficient. I have to focus (and burn) energy in the typing itself, reading the screen, and I have to be sitting at the keyboard and screen to do it.
Anyone with a cordless phone and headset knows how much more productive you are when you and your hands aren't tied to the phone. (I would never do dishes at all if it weren't for phone calls.) The ability to write a document verbally with a wireless headset is fantastic, but very primitive right now. Add having your e-mail read to you on the same headset and you dictate your reply and send... Typing will practically disappear as soon as things like that become commonplace and of high quality.
Mice and their ilk will last longer, but optical recognition and voice commands are much faster for typical tasks. Of course design work and other precision drawing and command controls will extend manual control in those fields.
Attacking human-comp interfacing on all fronts is surely good, but optical and voice control are higher on the evolutionary scale than ever-more sophisticated manual data entry devices. Pyramidal keyboards, data gloves, et al are all variations on an inferior theme. Keyboards, mice, trackballs, joystics, are incredibly inefficient compared to how fast our minds and our computers can process data. That's the real bottleneck right now, not the bus or platter rotation. This glove is just a new and improved way to get carpal tunnel.
There are already experiements with direct patching into the brain, and just think of the virus possibilities of running Outlook on that platform.
But his real compensation is in mortal souls and the eternal suffering of mankind, not salary. People put too much emphasis on paychecks, but often things like job satisfaction, such as that derived from torturing and humiliating the offspring of Yahweh, and perks, such as being legion and hanging with Elizabeth Hurley, are more important than the money.
There are also other ways to make money on the side. I mean, the South Park guest appearances alone... The Exxon and Republican endorsement deals... Plus, $666K is better than 35 pieces of silver. (adjusted for inflation)
I swear, as soon as my employer stops paying for my software I'm going to take a stand. Golldurnit.
Hasn't anyone decided who to blame for this yet? We must have someone to blame or we can't really talk about it. Everything should either be blamed on Osama bin Laden or on Bill Gates from now on, just for simplicity. It would make things so much easier for those poor news anchors out there currently struggling with big words like consequentialism and causation.
t-minus 19 minutes: First sold XP system booted.
-19.5: First annoying XP nag message to open a Passport account
-20: First XP "MSN Network" desktop icon deleted
-25: First realization by first XP system buyer that most of his old system settings won't transfer.
-26: First XP-inspired burst of profanity.
-28: Attempt to use legacy scanner results in crash and second XP-inspired burst of profanity.
-30: First XP-related bug report files.
No really, it's me. Send me an e-mail if you like. I've been reading/. for a long time. I was taking networking seriously long before chess.
Actually I was only going to post the first paragraph of that, which is from my article that went up at KasparovChess yesterday, and the link, but my mouse ran amok in my sleep-deprived, sunburned state and I clicked submit. Really.
Anyway, here's the link to the full article. Only the last bit is about Fischer. KasparovChess article about Fischer online.
> Fringe murmurs hit the major media this weekend when Nigel Short declared that he believes he has been playing Bobby Fischer online. (Another report of the report here from AP.) Rumors of Fischer playing internet chess have been going around for months now and have caused a furor amongst the usual fans and foes. Most of these stories go as follows: 1) Mr. X insists that both players log on as guests and all communication is handled by way of an intermediary. 2) Mr. X plays crazy openings, often moving his king back and forth to intentionally waste time. 3) Despite this, Mr. X destroys top GMs in these blitz games, making virtually no errors. 4) The games are never published, Mr. X never says he is Fischer or makes comments suggesting he is. 5) Mr. X occasionally answers trivia questions about Fischer's life.
You don't need to be Johnny Cochran to know the difference between concrete and circumstantial evidence, and what we have above is a wheelbarrow full of the latter. Nigel Short, speaking in the Sunday Telegraph Review article that is also devoid of substantiation, says that he is "99 per cent sure" he has "been playing against the chess legend." This is based on four sets of games, none of which are given or commented on, other than to say that Short lost the first set 8-0. (The article also says Short went 6-6 in a blitz match with Kasparov in 1995. From the context of Short's actual words these were apparently casual games.) The Telegraph doesn't call the evidence circumstantial, it calls it "overwhelming." Johnny Cochran would be proud.
Short was also impressed by Mr. X replying "Siegen 1970" when the Englishman asked him if he knew Armando Acevedo. Well, I not only know of him, but I met the simpatico Mexican master in the flesh 10 years ago. But that's another story. Acevedo lost to Fischer in the 1970 Siegen Olympiad. That many a Fischer fan and anyone with a database would also know this seems to have been overlooked in this latest continuation of the rampant desire to believe Fischer is not only alive and well, but just biding his time before coming back to take his rightful crown at the age of 58. (It is not as if the person playing these games, Fischer or not, would be unaware of the intense speculation that has been ongoing in the chess community. Fischer was the only Grandmaster the Mexican faced, at least as far as his published games are concerned.) Who is qualified to ask Fischer a question that only Fischer would know? Not many people, and probably not Nigel Short. (Here's one for Bobby: Buenos Aires, 1996. What did you say Mickey Kantor was too busy doing to protect your rights? The rude comment the interpreter wouldn't translate, but you caught her and repeated it several times? But most people at that press conference would know this one...)
Personally I have no problem at all believing Fischer plays online anonymously. Despite the obvious decline in his mental health, he was still very animated by chess when I met him in 1996. I do not doubt that if he played into shape he would be a tough opponent for the top 10 today and more than a match for Armando Acevedo. But acting as though he would be an invincible demigod after 30 years of almost complete removal from competitive chess is silly. He played a few dozen games against Spassky in 1992 and the rare flashes of brilliance only glimmered brighter due to the thick layers of rust on his game. His knowledge and insight helped Peter Leko several years ago when the two would meet in Hungary, this we know. We cannot imagine a Fischer who has left chess behind.
As I said above, if you have good arguments you don't need junk. A master playing with strong computer assistance would have little trouble demolishing a top GM in blitz, we know this from experience. Even in rapid games humans make too many mistakes to compete successfully against CPU power on a consistent basis. I'm quite willing to believe that Bobby Fischer is "out there" and playing blitz online, but it will take published games, and more than just a few, to make this into anything more than a rumor.
I'm the only US-based employee, I work from home, the dev office is in Israel, the content office is in Moscow, and I'm in charge. It's a mess, but I can go out and play basketball in the afternoon and then work at night to sync with my coworkers.
Let's see when the clever media use these terms regarding wireless malware:
"air-borne virus"
"pegasus" (flying trojan, oh never mind)
"Quetzalcoatl" (you can figure it out)
Technical specs aside, and interesting they are, it would be nice to see a list of vendors for those feebleminded souls (e.g., moi) who don't plan on building a machine by molding their own tower and smithing the wires. IBM just dropped AMD chips and Dell doesn't sell them. That leaves Compaq (ick) and, I think, HP in the heavyweight category. Also Gateway and Micron. AMD maintains what looks like an outdated list of where to buy AMD systems here: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bguide.html
Everyone is talking major CPU price war in the upcoming months, so I'm thinking October for my monster-mega-dual-mp3 player. ("2GHz, because Word just doesn't open fast enough on a P3.") Cheap dual Athlon 1.4 by then?
Slashdot Mirror
I picked up a kit from Time-Warner cable here in Manhattan and set it up myself. I never took the included "Road-Runner" CD out of the envelope and I installed nothing. Plus, I run it through a router and firewall. No desire to risk their security sharing my files with a few thousand fellow subscribers.
Slate magazine's Moneybox runs a regular series of "Ad report cards" that are fairly savvy. This one linked to above previews some Super Bowl ads.
Mig
Long before internet gaming, serious RPG addicts were paying real cash for things that didn't exist even on hard drive somewhere in Texas. Giant gaming cons would see people offering cash under the table for other members of their gaming group to have their character/s give them weapons, etc. Since you could also leave a sort of will in many cases, there was often deals of the "buy me lunch and I'll leave my mace of +4 against zombies to you when I die."
This came of age with the net, of course. Ebay finally had to ban (or just regulate?) the sale of virtual property after several Ultima-related fiascoes caused bad publicity. Katz wrote about before that here: 'Ebay launches virtual property' and there was quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this.
While looking for that coverage I found this essay on Gaming Culture that mentions Ebay. Also a mention on USA Today. Apparently the selling violated the games' terms of use.
Saludos, Mig
(Karma for sale)
Gee, two chess threads in one week, I'm thrilled. But then as a chessplayer I love thrills, apparently.
It is eternally amusing to me to see Americans immediately start several chessplayers=geek threads the first thing the game is mentioned. I generalize, but they inevitably turn out to be Americans since it is about the only place in the world where such a view prevails. Even so it is a remarkable contradiction since in no other culture is chess so consistently used as a positive metaphor. Dozens of commercials use chess and chess imagery to symbolize intelligence and strategic planning. Every Hollywood movie and TV show that wants to not-so-subtly demonstrate that a character is brilliant and cultured slaps a chessboard - usually set up wrong - in his den or has him playing.
The 'chess is for geeks' model in the US is then most easily explained by envy and fear, much the way people who don't know anything about computers denigrate those who do. The old 'scribble scribble scribble' method of squeezing sour grapes. But in general most people I meet in the US are impressed and/or fascinated by the fact that I work for Garry Kasparov and am a master level player myself. No, I didn't get beat up in school for starting a chess club in my California high school. (At 1.95m that wasn't much of an issue.)
In Europe and South America chess and other 'brain games' receive both attention as sports and respect from the public. In the US - a country that has oxymoronic basketball scholarships - on the other hand, there is a tendency to want to believe that any sport worth the name must involve blood loss. (They conveniently ignore the various tubs of lard who play first base.)
The incredible level of concentration reached by Grandmasters is on par with that needed for any peak performer in any sport or art and the same goes for the amount of energy expended, although it is not as quantifiable in drops of sweat. Take a good look at a player before and after a week or two of professional chess and you'll see what I mean. Weight loss of ten kilos is not unusual and physical conditioning is critical for top performance. Most players begin to decline on the rating list by the time they pass 32 years of age, similar to professional sports like football. (There is only one player in the top 10 over that age and only one in the top 20 over 40 years old.)
As touched upon in the article that started the thread, chess is in many ways a thrilling and even violent game. Much like boxing, it is purely mano a mano; there are no teammates to blame, no wind that wasn't blowing your way, nothing but your ego on the line. Losing can be absolutely crushing, and to excel you must build up an ego on par with those possessed by other pro athletes. (Yes, they even refer to themselves in the third person sometimes.)
It can take months or even a lifetime to recover from a bad result. Even an amateur can have a missed chance or bad loss stick in their brain for years. You don't hear too many people going on about some pickup basketball game they lost 10 years ago, but this is common in chess. The psychological elements are extremely powerful, and the history of damaged individuals in chess do not only illustrate the attraction of chess for introverts and others with everything from quirks to acne to serious psychoses. These anecdotes also show the power of the game to affect people who were quite stable to begin with.
In short, chess ain't for sissies. Those who insult chessplayers are usually those who don't have suffient self-confidence to play it themselves. (Apart from people who just have no interest in it, of course.) In a culture that says chess is for smart people you have to come up with some sort of reason to explain why you aren't good at it. "It's for nerds," isn't a good one, but it appears to still be around.
I know lots of top chess players who wouldn't strike you as particularly intelligent otherwise. While chess employs many faculties that make up the amorphous term 'thinking,' there are also chessplayers who fail their math classes, don't like to read, and vote Republican.
Saludos, Mig
KasparovChess.com
Hello there. The biggest specific eval problem programs have right now is that of 'closed' positions. The strategies involved when there is a locked center are so distinct from when the center of the board is open that many of your evals much actually change if your program is going to make decent moves in these positions. You almost need three programs. (Multi-engine programs are common, but knowing when to switch is the tricky part.)
All the knowledge you put in is general. Programs value bishops over knights, but in many specific positions, knights will be stronger. A master knows this, a program has a very hard time recognizing the patterns that make this true. (And then recognizing when they are no longer present. The next step is then to realize that the other player can create these conditions. This is why humans still win regularly.)
This is why databases tuning is practical, but trying to find a perfect eval is not. The weights in the eval have to change dramatically based on structure, so a perfect program would be able to do this. No matter what the best average static eval values come out to be, they will never produce a perfect eval compared to a human or program that can adjust on the fly.
Most of Deep Blue's tweaks during the match were more to keep Kasparov on his heels than to actually fix something they really thought was wrong. There is no way you spend years on an eval with Grandmaster consultants (not weak ones) and then decide after one game there is something that needs to be changed. But professional chessplayers survive on analyzing their opponents, and Kasparov basically played a different opponent each day, which wasn't exactly kosher. But don't get me started on that, either.
There is still a great deal of debate whether or not Deep Blue was a stronger chessplayer than the top PC programs are now. Its potential was of course enormous, but various advances have made the current generation very strong. Deep Blue played so few publicly available games that there is no way to objectively point to a move or a game and say that a current program wouldn't have done as well or better. This isn't helped by how Kasparov played absolutely horribly during most of the games.
Mig
There have been many experiments in learning programs and most of today's top programs have at least a limited form of this.
Mostly it is simple database modification. Programs play the openings (the first 10-20 moves, usually) from massive databases of hundreds of thousands of games (human games) and variations. This is called the opening book. As bizarre as it might sound, chess programs don't usually 'think' at all in the first dozen moves or so; they simply play what's recommended in their book of human games. (Which sometimes leads to freaky events.)
When a program with book learning loses a game, or even gets a very negative evaluation during it, it will downgrade the evaluation of that opening line in it's book, so it won't play it again. This is why you can't just repeat an entire winning game against program again and again. (This is very hard to do even if the program doesn't have book learning. The timing has to be perfect and they usually have some randomizing algorythm either in the book, the engine, or both.)
Having an engine play endlessly against itself to learn and improve works to a certain extent. But remember that you run into a serious time factor. If those are two hour games, say, the quality of the moves will be lower than when the program plays a four-hour game in a tournament. So something it put down as good may turn out to be bad. And at longer time controls you'd need years to produce the quantity of checked variations to produce something practically useful.
But programmers do do what you say to test and tweak new versions. If your new beta isn't beating your old gold you need to find out why. Remember, however, that this doesn't necessarily produce a program that is much stronger overall, but one that is stronger than the other one. And when you increase the scope by introducing other engines and versions it again becomes very time-consuming.
This is why they use test suites of chess problems and just check to see which version scores best.
Most of the top programmers work in conjunction with professional players (Grandmasters) to 'tune' their opening books. This is not only weeding out bad lines but creating a book that will help the program get positions that it plays well. Many openings played by Grandmasters are completely incomprehensible to programs, while the comps play certain types of positions better than any human ever could.
Saludos, Mig
Don't sweat it, I'm used to anonymous loons. (This one certainly doesn't work for us; our technical staff is Israeli and they all know me quite well. I worked there on the site design for seven months pre-launch.) I still cruise by the chess groups in the Usenet but am inevitably flamed as having gone over to the dark side for working with Kasparov. (I used to just write columns in my spare time on several sites.)
/. in my next editorial...
I'm also 'vice-president of content,' but that's just a typical late-20th-century dotcom title. Ahh, back when everyone was at least a VP. If ya don't believe me I'll mention
Hmm, where to start. My name is Mig Greengard and I run Garry Kasparov's website. I work with Shay Bushinsky, who is one of the programmers of Junior, the current world microcomputer chess champion. Just leaping at a chance to karma whore in my specialty. Let me cruise through the various questions and misperceptions I've seen so far.
This is an online tournament held in the biggest online chessplaying site, the ICC. The games are "60 + 10" time control, meaning each computer gets 60 minutes on its clock and 10 seconds are added for each move. So games can last up to 2.5 hours, tops. If you think this is long, this is what we call "rapid chess." Classical games can last up to seven hours.
Uniform hardware has pretty much been given up. They still distinguish between microcomputer and massive machines like those at NASA and Deep Blue, but everything is pretty much wide open these days. The programmers try to get the best hardware they can and usually know very well which platform is best for their program. (There WERE hardware chess accelerator cards, by the way. Back in the 80s when RISC and dedicated chess processors had better cost/chess performance ratios than CPUs. This hasn't been true since the Pentium, although various "Deep Blue on a chip" initiatives exist, including one by a member of the DB team.)
Anyone with a Slashdot account automatically forfeits the ability to call anyone else a nerd.
Move lists and online replay are both available on the site in the original post and at the ICC. Move lists are called "PGN" (portable (or player) game notation") which is an ASCII format used in databases but can be printed out and read easily if you know algabraic chess notation. Online java game viewer applets are quite common.
Both Shannon and Turing spent quite a lot of time on chess algorithms. Shannon actually wrote the first chess program before a computer existed. He 'ran' the program using slips of paper and generated moves this way.
The chess programming breakdown already posted is pretty good. The key concept these days is brute force speed versus knowledge. 20 years ago most programmers thought you needed to make the thing somehow think like a human because the brute force method was so slow. Intel and Moore won. The "fast searchers" now dominate thanks to the minimax algorithm. It just looks at one line after another and counts the beans to rapidly prune. Programs differ to an extreme degree in the amount of knowledge they apply. (HIARCS, for example, is one of the few "slow" programs at the top. It applies a lot of knowledge and looks at maybe 1% of the number of positions the fast programs like Fritz and Junior check.) A top level program, and the top 5-8 are roughly equal at a given time, will look at over one million positions per second. This sounds like a lot (well, it is a lot), but it only puts the program at a level equal to a top 100 level player at a classical time control. (At faster time controls, particularly blitz games of just minutes per side, computers are lethal. Humans just can't play mistake-free chess at that speed.) A program will look six-eight moves deep on the average, but extension will dive deeply into promising or unclear lines, sometimes up to 20 moves in a middlegame position.
Those who think chess is solvable should speak only theoretically. The number of positions is one of those great "million times the number of stars times the grains of sand in the world" numbers. The current method of tree and pruning adds less than one full move of search depth when you double processing power (node count). So the diminishing returns are very much here. The game of go is even worse for comps. Top programs still can't touch the human masters. Back-solving chess using massive databases starting with just a few pieces has had a big impact on computer chess in the past decade. Invented by Ken Thompson (yes, that Ken Thompson), endgame tablebases can now play any combination of five pieces (and many combinations of six) perfectly. This leads to humorous situations of a computer making optically stupid moves to reach a tablebase position it knows for sure is a mathematical win. (Tablebases allow the once-fantastical announcements of things like "checkmate in 45 moves.")
Most of the top commercial programs ARE playing in this event, but most people, particularly chess-ignorant Americans, only know Chessmaster. Fritz, Junior, HIARCS, and Shredder are all top commercial programs. In the chess world, Fritz is almost synonymous with chess program. Chessmaster has a very strong engine (called The King) by a well-known Dutch programmer. Various versions of The King have participated in these competitions and done just fine. Chessmaster has no reason to put its name brand on the line in these bloodbaths. An open tournament like this of only 11 rounds is not at all scientific, for one, but there mostly it's that since all these programs are so strong the power of the engine really isn't the most relevant thing when an amateur buys a chess program. Features like training materials, game databases, GUI, and graphics are much more relevant. Any decent program will kill you on even a low level unless you are an expert.
There are dozens of places to play online, and most of them have computer players as well. KasparovChess has multiple versions of the champion program Junior running and a new one generates when someone starts a game with one so you can always give it a try. (It's a dumbed-down version or it wouldn't be much fun.) The sites with the most players are, inevitably, Yahoo! and MSN. Their software and community suck, of course. Location, location, location. Of the specialist sites, the ICC, chess.net, and KasparovChess.com (my site, as disclosed above) are the largest and best. They have downloadable client software and administrated communities as well as live events, lessons, etc.
There have been many attempts at the holy grail of a massive online tournament. The biggest problem is simply cheating using these programs we're talking about. I could go on for a few dozen pages about methods and countermethods for catching cheats, but basically it's impossible at the end of the day. Don't get me started. KasparovChess hosted the first super-tournament to be played online, in the beginning of 2000. We had human observers with each Grandmaster, all over the world. We also hosted the largest online tournament so far, the world school chess championships. Thousands of kids from hundreds of schools around the world played. (Gotta trust the kids and teachers, right? Right? Actually there were several accusations made, but no decent cases.)
Yes, the ICC used to be free, and that free internet chess server (FICS) is still alive and well, although it is rapidly losing market share. There was a long and bitter battle about that split and the use of the FICS kernel, which is the foundation of just about every chess playing site in the world.
We cover top computer chess events, of which this one really isn't, but if you want to browse around some start here, at the last world championship. WMCCC
It sounds funny, but in the computer championships they have to play face to face and the programmer himself has to make the moves. The worry, of course, is HUMAN cheating, that is, a strong human helping the computer in an online event. The wisdom of a human Grandmaster combined with the accuracy of a computer program would be a devastating combination. (They have competitions of this, with GMs using computers while they play. It's called 'advanced chess' and was introduced by Kasparov. It's interesting, but not always dramatically superior quality chess.)
You can also stop by and play for free, either with an account and a rating or as a guest. We have a java applet if you don't want to download and install. We also have a lot of "learn to play" materials if you are one of the sad crowd that think it's just another board game.
Saludos, Mig
Not the e-mail domain. (Yep, that admin at MSN is really going to pay!) They ain't spoofing their URL..
When particularly motivated, usually when the 'remove' address proves bogus, I'll go to their site and whois the URL. Then I'll forward the spam, often two or three per day, to the contact e-mail addresses found there with a brief explanation. Sometimes I even sign them up for p0rn newsletters, not that I would know where to find those.
The typical e-mortgage spams lead to an URL registered to a casino company. They'll probably enjoy the newsletters.
Mig
Spooky timing. Just this week I got an e-mail from Paypal saying that I had sold something to someone involved with credit card fraud. According to the very lawyerly doc, I had 72 hours to send them MY SIDE of the story (?) to qualify for their Seller Protection Policy. I also had to meet a six or seven other requirements, most of which I assumed were handled by Paypal. (How would I know if I shipped to his verified credit card mailing address or not!? He was a "verified buyer" according to PP.)
So I get 700 characters to tell them that the guy had said the item arrived broken (see UPS thread here for that) and I should file a claim and send him the money. I offered to take the item back and give him the money back, he declined. (Now obvious why.) UPS kept saying things were being investigated and I haven't followed-up very often.
I go through the Paypal form (no other contact permitted, they make this quite clear). Then I log into my account to find they have debited the $1800.00! I don't keep much money there, mostly for impulse E-bay items, but it's gone now. I have received no communications from them at all.
Basically they seem to try to pass the fraud buck along to the seller if at all possible even though the breakdown was clearly on their side. It's even worse because like most people I never would have dealt with such a transaction without Paypal's supposed verification and protection. So they are just facilitating fraud if their protection is no good. This review process had better be simply nominal or I'm going to pitch a fit.
Saludos, Mig
I sold a server on Ebay and had it packaged at a "Mailboxes Etc." in Manhattan and shipped UPS to Pennsylvania. The person who got it says it looked like it had been dropped from at least four feet, enough to crack the entire (metal) case. I had bought insurance, and UPS sent someone over to the guy's house to examine it. They have to make sure it was packed to spec or they blame the sender (Mailboxes Etc. in this case).
Despite their basically admitting it was damaged during shipment and that it was packed correctly, this was over two months ago and I'm still waiting for something to happen. They don't give me a point of contact so I have to start from scratch every time I call. Total mess.
Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds"? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...
Slander the man if you will, but at least Bert is kosher, and/or the Islamic equivalent!
I thought about that, that's why I said efficiency and not speed. I type much faster than what voice-recognition can handle these days, and probably faster than anyone can speak at a comprehensible level. But it's extremely inefficient. I have to focus (and burn) energy in the typing itself, reading the screen, and I have to be sitting at the keyboard and screen to do it.
Anyone with a cordless phone and headset knows how much more productive you are when you and your hands aren't tied to the phone. (I would never do dishes at all if it weren't for phone calls.) The ability to write a document verbally with a wireless headset is fantastic, but very primitive right now. Add having your e-mail read to you on the same headset and you dictate your reply and send... Typing will practically disappear as soon as things like that become commonplace and of high quality.
Mice and their ilk will last longer, but optical recognition and voice commands are much faster for typical tasks. Of course design work and other precision drawing and command controls will extend manual control in those fields.
Attacking human-comp interfacing on all fronts is surely good, but optical and voice control are higher on the evolutionary scale than ever-more sophisticated manual data entry devices. Pyramidal keyboards, data gloves, et al are all variations on an inferior theme. Keyboards, mice, trackballs, joystics, are incredibly inefficient compared to how fast our minds and our computers can process data. That's the real bottleneck right now, not the bus or platter rotation. This glove is just a new and improved way to get carpal tunnel.
There are already experiements with direct patching into the brain, and just think of the virus possibilities of running Outlook on that platform.
But his real compensation is in mortal souls and the eternal suffering of mankind, not salary. People put too much emphasis on paychecks, but often things like job satisfaction, such as that derived from torturing and humiliating the offspring of Yahweh, and perks, such as being legion and hanging with Elizabeth Hurley, are more important than the money.
There are also other ways to make money on the side. I mean, the South Park guest appearances alone... The Exxon and Republican endorsement deals... Plus, $666K is better than 35 pieces of silver. (adjusted for inflation)
I swear, as soon as my employer stops paying for my software I'm going to take a stand. Golldurnit.
Hasn't anyone decided who to blame for this yet? We must have someone to blame or we can't really talk about it. Everything should either be blamed on Osama bin Laden or on Bill Gates from now on, just for simplicity. It would make things so much easier for those poor news anchors out there currently struggling with big words like consequentialism and causation.
XP system sold
t-minus 19 minutes: First sold XP system booted.
-19.5: First annoying XP nag message to open a Passport account
-20: First XP "MSN Network" desktop icon deleted
-25: First realization by first XP system buyer that most of his old system settings won't transfer.
-26: First XP-inspired burst of profanity.
-28: Attempt to use legacy scanner results in crash and second XP-inspired burst of profanity.
-30: First XP-related bug report files.
And so it begins!
No really, it's me. Send me an e-mail if you like. I've been reading /. for a long time. I was taking networking seriously long before chess.
Actually I was only going to post the first paragraph of that, which is from my article that went up at KasparovChess yesterday, and the link, but my mouse ran amok in my sleep-deprived, sunburned state and I clicked submit. Really.
Anyway, here's the link to the full article. Only the last bit is about Fischer.
KasparovChess article about Fischer online.
> Fringe murmurs hit the major media this weekend when Nigel Short declared that he believes he has been playing Bobby Fischer online. (Another report of the report here from AP.) Rumors of Fischer playing internet chess have been going around for months now and have caused a furor amongst the usual fans and foes. Most of these stories go as follows: 1) Mr. X insists that both players log on as guests and all communication is handled by way of an intermediary. 2) Mr. X plays crazy openings, often moving his king back and forth to intentionally waste time. 3) Despite this, Mr. X destroys top GMs in these blitz games, making virtually no errors. 4) The games are never published, Mr. X never says he is Fischer or makes comments suggesting he is. 5) Mr. X occasionally answers trivia questions about Fischer's life.
You don't need to be Johnny Cochran to know the difference between concrete and circumstantial evidence, and what we have above is a wheelbarrow full of the latter. Nigel Short, speaking in the Sunday Telegraph Review article that is also devoid of substantiation, says that he is "99 per cent sure" he has "been playing against the chess legend." This is based on four sets of games, none of which are given or commented on, other than to say that Short lost the first set 8-0. (The article also says Short went 6-6 in a blitz match with Kasparov in 1995. From the context of Short's actual words these were apparently casual games.) The Telegraph doesn't call the evidence circumstantial, it calls it "overwhelming." Johnny Cochran would be proud.
Short was also impressed by Mr. X replying "Siegen 1970" when the Englishman asked him if he knew Armando Acevedo. Well, I not only know of him, but I met the simpatico Mexican master in the flesh 10 years ago. But that's another story. Acevedo lost to Fischer in the 1970 Siegen Olympiad. That many a Fischer fan and anyone with a database would also know this seems to have been overlooked in this latest continuation of the rampant desire to believe Fischer is not only alive and well, but just biding his time before coming back to take his rightful crown at the age of 58. (It is not as if the person playing these games, Fischer or not, would be unaware of the intense speculation that has been ongoing in the chess community. Fischer was the only Grandmaster the Mexican faced, at least as far as his published games are concerned.) Who is qualified to ask Fischer a question that only Fischer would know? Not many people, and probably not Nigel Short. (Here's one for Bobby: Buenos Aires, 1996. What did you say Mickey Kantor was too busy doing to protect your rights? The rude comment the interpreter wouldn't translate, but you caught her and repeated it several times? But most people at that press conference would know this one...)
Personally I have no problem at all believing Fischer plays online anonymously. Despite the obvious decline in his mental health, he was still very animated by chess when I met him in 1996. I do not doubt that if he played into shape he would be a tough opponent for the top 10 today and more than a match for Armando Acevedo. But acting as though he would be an invincible demigod after 30 years of almost complete removal from competitive chess is silly. He played a few dozen games against Spassky in 1992 and the rare flashes of brilliance only glimmered brighter due to the thick layers of rust on his game. His knowledge and insight helped Peter Leko several years ago when the two would meet in Hungary, this we know. We cannot imagine a Fischer who has left chess behind.
As I said above, if you have good arguments you don't need junk. A master playing with strong computer assistance would have little trouble demolishing a top GM in blitz, we know this from experience. Even in rapid games humans make too many mistakes to compete successfully against CPU power on a consistent basis. I'm quite willing to believe that Bobby Fischer is "out there" and playing blitz online, but it will take published games, and more than just a few, to make this into anything more than a rumor.
I'm the only US-based employee, I work from home, the dev office is in Israel, the content office is in Moscow, and I'm in charge. It's a mess, but I can go out and play basketball in the afternoon and then work at night to sync with my coworkers.
Let's see when the clever media use these terms regarding wireless malware:
"air-borne virus"
"pegasus" (flying trojan, oh never mind)
"Quetzalcoatl" (you can figure it out)
More prosaic:
"wireless worm"
"Code Infrared"
Technical specs aside, and interesting they are, it would be nice to see a list of vendors for those feebleminded souls (e.g., moi) who don't plan on building a machine by molding their own tower and smithing the wires. IBM just dropped AMD chips and Dell doesn't sell them. That leaves Compaq (ick) and, I think, HP in the heavyweight category. Also Gateway and Micron. AMD maintains what looks like an outdated list of where to buy AMD systems here: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bguide.html
Everyone is talking major CPU price war in the upcoming months, so I'm thinking October for my monster-mega-dual-mp3 player. ("2GHz, because Word just doesn't open fast enough on a P3.") Cheap dual Athlon 1.4 by then?
Saludos, Mig
http://www.kasparovchess.com