World Computer Chess Championships Underway

azaris writes "While the FIDE World Championships for human players in Tripoli, Libya are down to the last two contestants, the computers are playing their own 12th World Computer Chess Championship in Ramat-Gan, Israel. How will the open source chess engine Crafty do against the proprietary closed engines? Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"

Well...

[by Anonymous Coward]

As long as you don't give them exclusive control to the pod bay door, I think computers should be allowed to play chess as they please.

Re:Well...

[Fred_A (10934)]

I'm so disapointed, I read the story title as a "computer cheese championship" and it's just a boring board game. What a let down.

Interesting computer Chess?

[gambit3 (463693)]

Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"

I don't think so (replying to the question posed by the original poster), because I believe a well-programmed algorithm would care only about winning, and not necessarily taking chances or exploring possibilities that a human player would...

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[kyle_b_gorman (777157)]

you think kasparov is interested in any move that won't (at least indirectly) help him win?

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[AshtangiMan (684031)]

yes he is . . . but not from the economic only standpoint that the computer algorithms demand. Looking at even recent Kasparov games shows that he does not play the economy equation the way computers do. This is why he (and the other human) chess players are infinitely interesting to watch, while the computer, while nearly unbeatable, is also very boring.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[Kenja (541830)]

Also, the computer isn't going to throw a hissyfit when they lose. Or am I the only one who watches chess just for the losing nerd thorwing a complete wobbler and whining like a little girl?

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[mbrother (739193)]

I used to play high school chess (hey, I was the cool one on the team...really!). There was this kid we called "The Zapper." He had cerbreal palsy and most people, the first time they saw him, respected him for working against his physical limitations and competing like anyone else. And he wasn't that bad for his age. But...he was a terrible loser! He would literally throw hissy fits and knock the pieces all over the table, the floor, where ever, when he lost, and yell out obscure threats. He was one of these people who used his condition as an excuse to be a big baby whiner, and I found it quite shocking. It helped me see past handicaps to the people beyond, good and bad. Good people come in all shapes and sizes, and so do bad people.

As a teenage chess player, I had long hair and listened to loud, hard rock and metal on my walkman, but I would play really boring, solid moves. I got a draw off Boris Spassky in an exhibition once playing the Caro-Kann. My friend played a double King Pawn and lost in 5 hours in a wild King's Gambit game, the last game going. I kind of wish I'd played more aggresively now, although I cherished the draw for many years and had a calculus test to study for.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[hunterx11 (778171)]

True...someone like Mikhail Tal would probably fare poorly against computers if he played the kind of spectacular, speculative, and psychologically devastating sacrifices that made him so popular.

Actually, I think the real reason the computer drew in the latest matches against Kasparov and Kramnik was psychology more than anything else. The computer does not get stressed or fatigued when it is under pressure, nor does it lose morale after a blunder (like Kramnik) or have any fears of losing (like Kasparov).

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[TastyWords (640141)]

Tal may not have had as many problems as suggested. One of the issues for the computerized chess is when there are no time limits - grind, grind, grind, ...

When they're playing on the clock, it makes a world of difference.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[ookabooka (731013)]

True, except human players can make simple mistakes. A computer never makes a mistake, it just only looks so far. Deep Fritz 8 has beatten Kasporov. I mean, if you can evaluate 2.4 million positions a second (i can on my dually) there does come a point where a human player cant keep up, what if that were 24 million, 240 million? Computers dont have finite limits like a person. It used to take a super computer to even compete with a GM (grandmaster) now the average home computer can give him a run for his money.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[Short Circuit (52384)]

Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.

Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper. Or even in your head, following logic.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[nacturation (646836)]

Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.

Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper. Or even in your head, following logic.

Intuition is not much more than having a large sample set from which to draw and using that sample set to infer generalities. Those generalities allow you to recognize certain patterns and also reject other patterns outright so that you don't consciously consider them. When you think about it, intuition really means "I have a hunch", and those hunches are formed on the basis of past experience. There's nothing that prevents a computer from building up a sufficiently large body of samples and, with the proper programming of course, inferring patterns from it as well.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[michael_cain (66650)]

Those generalities allow you to recognize certain patterns and also reject other patterns

Don't the top-notch computer programs already do this in one form or another? I mean, it seems like such an obvious line of research for pattern matching and pattern recognition people to explore. Or perhaps not -- that may be one of the reasons that computers aren't as good at Go as they are at chess, Go appearing (to a rank beginner) to depend more on pattern recognition and less on straight-forward deductive analysis.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[TygerFish (176957)]

Intuition is not much more than having a large sample set from which to draw and using that

sample set to infer generalities. Those generalities allow you to recognize certain patterns and also reject other patterns outright so that you don't consciously consider them. When you think about it, intuition really means "I have a hunch", and those hunches are formed on the basis of past experience. There's nothing that prevents a computer from building up a sufficiently large body of samples and, with the proper programming of course, inferring patterns from it as well.

Intuition plays a strong role in the play of human players great and small and it is the basis by which one can understand the differences not only between human and computer players but between interesting and uninteresting chess games.

Having a hunch about the nature of a position and the posibilities therein have allowed some of the greatest tactical games ever played and this is the identifying characteristic of the matter in understanding the nature of the game. Were humans different, the game before computers would have been different: humans who saw every possibility in a continuation leading to a 'decided' position at the end of each line would have simply announced the result or range of results and the nature of chess itself would be unrecognizable to us ('Mate in at least 37 or at most 103!').

Human intuition allows the 'miracles' of chess--the elegance of chess--in those games that make the game breathtaking and that inspire players to play in the hope of generating them (think of classics like Morphy-v-Consultants or Lasker-v-thomas or many of Mikhail Tal's best games). The intuition or, indeed, inspiration, of games like those are more than instances of the inference from generalities; they are instances of a grandiose specific arising from a game's sea of possibilities. It is the elegance of a queen sacrifice leading not to ineluctable mate (a combination like the end of Morphy-v-consultants), but to a powerful attack with a favorable conclusion (say, the end of Lasker-v-Thomas or of Reti-v-Capablanca) which, as an act, is as difficult to quantify as is the word, 'beauty.'

In a broad sense, a machine's ability to process advantage takes the wonder out of the thing because you know that there is nothing going on but the examination of a great number of positions but it is hard to imagine to imagine programmers 'weighting' their programs for positions conducive to the types of continuations that made of chess-players bother with chess in the first place.

The short form of all of the above is: 'computer programs either are or will soon be the strongest players on earth, but their games tend to be dry.'

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[raytracer (51035)]

Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.

Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper. Or even in your head, following logic.

Indeed. Once in a great, great while, your intuition may even tell you something which turns out to actually be true.

No, Intuition is not the key to master-level play

[fw3 (523647)]

Yes a human chess player has a few neat tools. The primary one is called:

Positional play

Algorithms / heuristics which have attempted to capture this 'intelligent' side of chess players' methodology have uniformly failed and the winning programs continue to primarily rely on simple evaluation of material.

This means that a master-level player has a strong advantage in offering a computer opponent some material in exchange say for superior control of the center of the board.

Advanced chess play has very little to do with 'intuition'. The specific tools that come to bear are:

exhaustive study of openings and endings
solid tactical evaluation (stupid mistakes still lose games)
positional evaluation

generally, for instance it's suicide to allow a game against a machine develop into an 'open' vs a 'closed' position. Tactical evaluation is less effective in closed positions; in open positions the machine's greater depth-search works extremely well.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[bobhagopian (681765)]

Computers dont have finite limits like a person. That's true. I can only count to 32768.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[jeblucas (560748)]

If the computer considers the library of Emmanuel Lasker [chesscorner.com], then it could be "more interesting". He was (in)famous for making -ahem- startling [chessgames.com] moves [wordiq.com] for someone of his caliber. Traditional chess theory would call them blunders, but they would serve to complicate the board to a degree that his opponents could not as easily determine the best moves before he could. He would thus confuse, recover, and gain advantage before they could adequately respond. A chess program designed to confuse more rigid chess programs could serve to benefit in the same way Lasker did.

Re:Interesting computer Chess?

[sokoban (142301)]

Well, computers have played some pretty damn interesting chess in the past. Let's take the Deep Blue-Kasparov matches as a much overused and overhyped example:
1996 game 1: 23. d5 was a brilliant move on deep blue's part. I would hope that I would find such a good move there. Yes, the computer found that move through calculation, but the move itself shows a great understanding of spatial and pawn structure elements of the position.

1997 game 2: this game was riddled with awesome moves, but 23. Rec1 33. Nf5 and 24. Ra3 are the cream of the crop.
23 Rec1 is annoying and almost a human move. The computer is playing almost perfectly here. I think Kasparov has very little counterplay here. Kasparov's queenside is UGLY and he gets little to nothing in compensation.
24. Ra3 just rocks here. Deep blue is playing the Ruy Loppez like he means it. That move made me really wonder about who was behind the computer. The Ruy Lopez is a rich opening with lots of crazy details regarding strategies in each variation, but deep blue nailed them like any world level player who playes the lopez should. Basically, deep blue couldn't have forseen a Lopez variation, but found the correct strategies all the same. Also in this game, Deep Blue psyched Kasparov out of a draw. In his top form, Kasparov WOULD HAVE SEEN the draw. 45... Qe3 does it. At the least, it is a draw by perpetual check, and if Deep Blue tried to stop it he gets crushed.
33. Nf5 is a very "computer" move, but really blows away Kaspy. It doesn't make sense muc really, but brings the bishop into play fast and kind of psyched out Kasparov.

So you see, computers can play interesting chess. These are only 2 great games I have around of a computer-human match. there are others, but theses are the most dramatic.

It's kind of ironic...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...that the Computer Chess championship is in Libya, while Qaddafi banned Israeli players from the FIDE championship. Actually, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of FIDE and the Russian state of Kalmykia, previously tried to have the FIDE championship in Baghdad before he was forced not to by the first Gulf War.

Libya is our friend, Eurasia has always...

[fantomas (94850)]

Hey, Libya is our friend, Libya has always been our friend. Oh, I meant Eurasia. Or did I mean Eastasia?

Huh, politics, I just leave that to politicians, they tell the truth, they know what's best ;-)

Shades of WOPR

[erucsbo (627371)]

Computers play their own championship?
Ultimately this will have to result in stalemate after stalemate won't it?
Kinda like WOPR in 'Wargames' playing tic-tac-toe with itself.

Re:Shades of WOPR

[terber (599156)]

> In this tournament they put all
> the engines on identical comptuers

This is not correct.

In fact, every contestant is allowed to use his own hardware.

Contestants which are not opting for their own hardware, get an Pentium-4 with 2,8 GHz from the Bar-Ilan-University.

Crafty (freeware) brings its own quad-Opteron machine with 2,4 GHz!

Two other contestants are playing on quad-Opterons, too. Fritz and Shredder are playing with 2,2 GHz resp. 2,0 GHz. Both machines are from the sponsor Transtec.

Most interesting part of computer championships

[civilengineer (669209)]

Computers do not settle for draws like humans do in face of complications. This will guarentee some extremely interesting endings.

Also, since Ken Thompson is making great progress on building endgame databases, the games might be all played to end.

Re:Most interesting part of computer championships

[Short Circuit (52384)]

Computers do not settle for draws like humans do in face of complications.

Sure they can, if they're directed to minimize losses.

Personally, I'm curious why game theory software doesn't have the kinds of export restrictions that encryption software or computing hardware does.

First "GO" Post

[Saeger (456549)]

Forget chess. To truly push the limits of computing and AI we should instead be trying to improve on the ancient game of "Go" [wikipedia.org]. No computer can even come close to besting a human here yet.

--

Re:First "GO" Post

[Dan Ost (415913)]

Give it time. Once computers are consistently beating the greatest human
players, the same clever people who worked so hard on building computer
chess players will find new problems to spend their time on. Go will certainly
be on of them.

Re:First "GO" Post

[harlows_monkeys (106428)]

Go will certainly be on of them

Go is much harder than Chess for computers because brute force doesn't work even remotely as well. The branching factor is much higher (until the endgame, there are 100-360 possibilities per ply, compared to a dozen or two for chess), and the depth you might need to search is much deeper (consider a ladder starting on one side of the board whose outcome depends on the stones on the other side, 30 ply down the tree, and determines the life or death of a large group).

Note that I'm not saying the good Chess programs are pure brute force. They are basically a combination of brute force and good AI working together, but the brute force is a critical component of their success. With Go, the AI has to pull all the weight, and it isn't nearly good enough.

Re:First "GO" Post

[Russellkhan (570824)]

I am very glad that you've posted about Go. It's a beautiful game and more people in the western world should know about it.

That said, I've never understood why so many Go players treat Go and Chess as an either/or, one vs the other type of choice. I play both Go and chess, and while I can easily see that there remain much greater challenges in computerized Go playing programs than in Chess (For those who don't know, the best Go playing programs play at roughly the level of an intermediate amateur human player), this fact does not take away from the fact that chess is still an interesting game, both to play and, I'm sure, to develop better computer opponents for. Nor does the work being done on chess take anything away from Go development.

While I'm here, I may as well post a Go wiki link [xmp.net] in a wiki that's all about Go. I realize you (parent poster) probably know about it, but just in case anyone is interested in learning more about Go, I figure it's a nice starting point.

Re:First "GO" Post

[JamesKPolk (13313)]

So why do you read slashdot if you can't handle "zealotry"?

Re:First "GO" Post

[nacturation (646836)]

However I was surprised to learn that the top human checkers players can easily trounce the computer. I would guess that checkers would be orders-of-magnitude a "simpler" problem than chess. Maybe it's that chess gets all the buzz, since it's considered to be the ultimate thinking-man's game.

Checkers has all but been solved. See this Mathworld article [wolfram.com] for more info. Basically, there's an estimated 10^12 to 10^18 different positions in a game, with a possibility for only having to solve 10^9 of them. With sufficient memory (Beowulf cluster, anyone?) checkers can be completely solved such that you can guarantee either a win or at worst a draw for the first person to move.

I hate computerized chess, the server cheats

[by Anonymous Coward]

It always ends up AWP'ing my queen! I suspect an aimbot.

computer vs human players

[spacerodent (790183)]

One of the main things that will never really be present in computer players is human reaction. A human may bluff, or try to call a bluff, or deliberatly do somthing retarded to cause you to underestimate them. Until the devlopment of true Ai there will never really be an "exciting" computer match. Currently computers simply calculate the most "efficient" move and take it. Thats like listening to a recording of music instead of playing it yourself.

Re:computer vs human players

[lpp (115405)]

But why would a "true AI" be susceptible to bluffs? Would a veneer of humanity laid atop an overgrown calculator somehow limit its ability to perform said calculations?

Or, to put it differently, why would I include sufficient ego in an AI to cause it to be able to underestimate an opponent?

No, I for one welcome our new AI overlords.

Re:computer vs human players

[exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870)]

As computers get better and better at chess humans will go on finding more and more dumb aspects of the game that they claim is what makes it interesting. If programmers wanted a machine to bluff they would - but why bother, bluffing against a grandmaster is generally a very bad strategy.

ChessGML animated with SVG

[wombatmobile (623057)]

.

Max Froumentin of W3C shows [w3.org] how to animate chess games by converting ChessGML to SVG with XSLT.

The Russians

[Ratfactor (15886)]

Can Robot Jox be far off?

The Russians pretty much dominate human chess. Now that things have shifted to machine chess, robots with chainsaws in the crotch are an obvious next move.

Re:The Russians

[winkydink (650484)]

And they'll hang around outside until the chess tournament ends and kick the shit out of the chess robots and take their lunch money.

Some results

[ninja0 (764532)]

Some results are at Chessbase [chessbase.com].

Crafty managed to draw Shredder, one of the big-name computer programs, in the first round. That makes it tied with a bunch of other programs in the middle of the pack.

Personally, I'm always excited to hear about the progress that has been made by chess engines. Nowadays, the top programs can compete with all of the top humans, without requiring a supercomputer.

still human against human

[sick_soul (794596)]

>Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"

#define PACMAN "ProgrammerAlgoristChessmasterMAN"

I think it becomes a game of PACMAN against other PACMAN, so I always see this as human vs human.

The games are interesting, not because they are "played" by the machines, but because they are indirectly played by the programmers.

Junior has an impressive track record...

[drclaw007 (765182)]

... keeping Kasparov to a 3:3 draw in one challenge. Interesting bishop sacrifice it used in one of the games - one of the better AI moves I have seen I must admit :) http://www.chessbase.com/shop/product.asp?pid=170& user=&coin=

Being open source doesn't hurt Crafty

[mebon (634191)]

Last November one of the programs, List, was disqualified [chessbase.com]for being suspected of using some of Crafty's source code.

Crafty may be open source but it looks like the rules won't allow competitors to use substantial parts of another competing program's code. So having the source available to everyone isn't a liability for Crafty.

Mebon

Re:USA?

[jfengel (409917)]

That seems a little harsh. Americans are active pursuers of all sorts of intellectual activity, from art to literature to science to technology. Many open-source developers are Americans. Americans have a boatload of Nobel prizes.

So chess doesn't happen to be the obsession here that it is in Russia. They're not so good at soccer, either. BFD. It doesn't mean that they do nothing but watch reality TV.

Re:USA?

[by Anonymous Coward]

"No native players"? You were hoping for Native American players?

In case you haven't heard, the USA is (almost entirely) a nation of IMMIGRANTS.

Glad the Russian-American & Japanese-American players have found a better life here.

Re:USA?

[zokrath (593920)]

Indeed; few other first world countries have such a stigma against using your mind for more noble functions. Having extended experience with computers and programming brings a label of 'pathetic nerds', while useless sports knowledge and statistics is often considered par for the course.

Luckily I was in the gifted program in Junior High and High School, where all of the teachers were dedicated Masters holders, and a much smaller percentage of students had an active criminal record.

No doubt partially res

Re:USA?

[Vellmont (569020)]

More like the US didn't (and doesn't) have state sponsored chess schools like the former Soviet Union did. If chess is such a great "purely intellectual pursuit", then why aren't all the great chess masters great geniuses and create wonderful things outside of chess? Chess may be a fun game and all, but all this connection between chess and "being intellectual" is just nonsense.

Re:USA?

[humblecoder (472099)]

All five of the players listed as from USA have blatantly obvious Russian (and one Japanese) names. Looks like no native players in this one (again). Alas, purely intellectual pursuits are frowned upon in these here parts.


No offense but this is one of the STUPIDEST comments I've ever read on slashdot. Actually, I take that back... I do mean to offend you.

Who's to say that the American players aren't fifth generation Americans? Just because they have an "ethnic" surname doesn't mean a thing? Surely you don't expect people to change their names to "Smith" or "Jones" upon obtaining American citizenship, do you? I mean, really!

Obvious "intellectual pursuits" like logic and rational thought are frowned upon in whatever parts you hail from, as well! If you are an American then maybe you have just proven your own argument, in which case I apologize.

Re:USA?

[tanguyr (468371)]

" Just out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a genuine USAian last name? Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin?"
Dances With Wolves?

Re:A chess posting on slashdot ?

[hunterx11 (778171)]

Acutally, a closed-source engine has been banned [chessbase.com] over accusations of copying. I guess with open-source there's no worry :)

Re:Breaking News....

[TastyWords (640141)]

"One of the competing teams"? Tell the truth. It was Microsoft, announcing their patent of the day.