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Deep Blue vs. Kasparov 10th Anniversary

Posted by Zonk on Tue May 15, 2007 06:33 PM
from the machines-win-again dept.
Classic Games (Games)
qeorqe writes "For the tenth anniversary of Deep Blue's victory over the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, Wired has an interview with Deep Blue developer Murray Cambell. The discuss the power of the now-aging supercomputer (equivalent to just one Cell processor), and the nonexistent future of PC vs. Human chess contests. 'It's almost the end of the story for chess in the sense that matches between chess machines and grand masters are becoming less interesting because it's so difficult for the human grand masters to compete successfully. They're even taking relatively dramatic steps like giving handicaps to computers, making them play the game with a pawn less or playing the game with less time. We're past the stage where there's a debate about who's better -- machines or grand masters -- and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.'"
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[+] Your Rights Online: Gary Kasparov Arrested Over Political Fight 427 comments
geddes writes "World chess champion turned opposition leader Gary Kasparov was arrested this morning while leading an march through Moscow in opposition to Russian President Vladamir Putin. Kasporov is a leader of the 'Other Russia' coalition which has been banned by the government from appearing on TV, and had been denied a marching permit. From the New York Times: 'Essentially barred from access to television, members of Other Russia have embraced street protests as the only platform to voice their opposition ahead of parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections next March. Early this month, Mr. Kasyanov's and Mr. Kasparov's Web sites were blocked, though it was unclear by whom.' Kasparov was later released from detention, though he was still fined for participating in the event."
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Deep Blue vs. Kasparov 10th Anniversary 50 Comments More /

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  • Even the odds! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tackhead (54550) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @06:40PM (#19139055)
    > We're past the stage where there's a debate about who's better -- machines or grand masters -- and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.'"

    How about we play overnight on January 19, 2038? I'll use this mechanical chess clock to keep track of my times, and Deep Blue can use those two 32-bit integers holding time_t, and subtract one from the other!

  • fischer random chess (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mo (2873) * on Tuesday May 15 2007, @06:44PM (#19139097)
    Can anyone comment at how well chess apps like Junior or Fritz are at playing grand masters at Fischer Random Chess?
      • I suspect its more that chess comuters are trying to play this variation without being coded for it.

        Since there are only 960 valid starting combinations it wouldn't take much for it to precompute the opening moves for each possible variable - what chess computers already have for the normal game.

        Even go won't stand against comptuers for long, its still a total knowlege deterministic game. Admittedly the search space is large and we still haven't figured out good metrics for it, but thats just a matter of ti
          • Yes I know thats fairly obvious - as is the fact that computers will continue getting better.

            My first point was that we should not be competing in such games against computers at all - in the same way we would not bother trying to arm wrestle a machine or run a stabnding 1/4 mile faster than a motorbike.

            My second point is that perfect knowlege deterministic games lack the scope for feints, bluff, artifacts of chance and player personality. I'm not saying they can't be there, but they are limited.

            I like the
  • and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.

    Make them play go.

    • Make them play go.


      Good idea. But, remember, computers were as bad at Chess in 1980 as they are at Go today. Wait 25 years. Exponentially faster hardware may not solve the problem, but algorithmic research certainly will.

      Computers are smarter than we are at a lot of things. It's only a matter of time until they are smarter at everything. You are as smart as the collective wisdom of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Computers can be.
    • Computers playing "Go" as an alternative to chess isn't likely to happen.

      If you think about it, back in the 80's dedicated chess computers were pretty smart and you had to be very good to beat them. Then a company called Cyrus produced "IS Chess" which was able to defeat the then best-of technology dedicated chess computers (and it ran in 16Kbytes of program space on a 3.5 MHz Z-80 processor). Even back then, in the mid 80's, home PC technology was strong enough to defeat many amateur players. I never beat

      • how 'bout playing chess while the computer player processes environmental data, is distracted by bowel movements, wants pizza, oh yeah call the wife after game,be aware of how high the ceiling is?

        if a computer can process all these and still play chess then we need to worry.

        Problem is, a computer can isolate tasks so much better than us. So one process can do the environmental processing, another does bowel movements, a third wants pizza, a forth handles the wife, and the fifth does the ceiling height. All

        • Yeeeeaaahh I'll run my wife-interfacing mechanism through another VM. Brilliant!

          -l

          P.s., I actually enjoy interfacing with my wife and we do it on a regular basis. Har-dee-har-har.

  • It was inevitable (Score:4, Funny)

    by L. VeGas (580015) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @06:49PM (#19139143) Homepage Journal
    We knew this was coming.

    However, there are still many games that computers are a long way away from beating skilled human opponents.

    Poker
    Go
    Rock Paper Scissors
    Mixed Martial Arts

  • A Great Documentary (Score:3, Informative)

    by Coryoth (254751) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @06:50PM (#19139145) Homepage Journal
    A quick note for anyone interested in this sort of thing who hsn't already run across it: there is a great documentary on the Kasparov/Deep Blue contest called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine [imdb.com]. Well worth checking out.
  • Chess is a zero sum perfect information game. Even a sufficently powerful computer with non optimal programming will at worst now hold its own with the best humans. Time to look for a different game. I believe decently talented players can still beat the best computer Go programs because although similar to chess the game strategy is more complex. When the computer programs eventually starts winning at Go, and win they will, I suggest kick boxing as the next challenge.

    • Re:How can it be made fairer? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Frans Faase (648933) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @07:03PM (#19139279) Homepage
      Indeed Go is a much bigger challenge. At the moment the best Go playing programs are about 8 Kyu. Which means that they are just childplay for any professional player (in Japan, China, South Korea). Even at the club where I play, half of the players beat these kind of programs with ease.

      • Indeed Go is a much bigger challenge. At the moment the best Go playing programs are about 8 Kyu. Which means that they are just childplay for any professional player (in Japan, China, South Korea). Even at the club where I play, half of the players beat these kind of programs with ease.

        Indeed, the only way to make computers competitive at Go is to give them a lot of handicap stones.

        Note that programs are getting exponentially better, partly because of better hardware, but also because of improved algorithm

    • I suggest kick boxing as the next challenge.
      Be careful what you wish for. While the average computer isn't that agile, it needs only one seriously hard kick to win. Human strength is limited to a certain range, the computer's isn't necessarily.

      A really sneaky computer will get you under the desk, when you're not expecting it.

      I, for one, do not want computers programmed to do that. Chess? Fine. Go? Sure. Poker? Why not. Martial arts? Not so much.
      • My computer posting program made that post after considering all available posts and outcomes of those posts and then determining the optimal post to elicit a response from a twat.
      • You are correct, when I said non optimal programming I was really referring to non optimal strategy programming. I cant recall the exact numbers but I remember stonking figures being put forward for bleeding edge AMD desktop chips of the time to brute force the best move.

      • How about the game of Diplomacy as a challenge for game AI?

        Diplomacy is for wusses. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.

  • I mean, anything in the last 40 years as a result of writing chess programs and building chess playing hardware?

    Yeah.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Chris Burke (6130)
      About soft AI, sure. All kinds of great things about tree pruning and state evaluation and stuff like that.

      No hard AI stuff, but that's because in order to have a hard AI chess machine, you'd have to make the AI then teach it chess. Much more practical to go for the direct approach.
    • Yes. We learned that an AI solution is not necessarily the best way to deal with an AI problem. Deep Blue was an engineering solution, not an AI solution.

      You can see a similar thing in Google's automatic language translation. It's purely statistical--they look at a lot of bilingual texts (such as minutes of the UN), and develop a statistical model to come up with translations of new documents. There's no attempt to build any AI into this. It's just a statistics problem and a data structures problem to t

    • I mean, anything in the last 40 years as a result of writing chess programs and building chess playing hardware?

      Deep Blue is completely uninteresting so far as AI is concerned. It used ancient game-tree search technology with pruning, rules for evaluating board positions (since full-depth search is still impossible, and you have to cut off at some point), and lots of hardware.

      A few board games are still challenges for AI, but I'll wager that they'll eventually be solved in almost identical fashion, i.e. by throwing lots of money at a rather dull search algorithm.

      Methinks video games will replace board games as a dri

  • Respect to Kasparov though (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @07:19PM (#19139423)
    I think it was the BBC a few years ago recorded a game between him and Nigel Short and intercut it with interviews of what they were thinking about the state of the game as it evolved. Kasparov was massively impressive with the sheer speed and coherence of his though and to me as a non chess player his almost psychic understanding of what Short was thinking was just amazing. Short after thinking he was winning and then realising what had just happen when Kasparov creamed him in a trap was classic.
    • In the late 70s and early 80s, the BBC had a (then groundbreaking) programme called "The Master Game", which did as you described: you 'heard the players thoughts as they played'. It was superb. (The actually played the games elsewhere, recorded their thoughts immediately after the game, and then replayed the game in the TV studio, in sync with their voice recordings of the moves).

  • Trounce! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @07:52PM (#19139709) Homepage

    Computers are so good at chess now that it's embarrassing. Unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life, any of the good PC chess programs can trounce you. Fritz [chessbase.com] at €119.90, runs on single or multiprocessor PCs, is rated at FIDE 2808 or so, and wins against Kasparov about half the time. If you're not a rated player, the chess programs for cell phones can beat you.

    One of the experts in computer chess explained what's happened. Study of human grandmaster games indicates that about one move in ten is suboptimal, even at that level. That's enough to give computers that don't make mistakes a significant edge.

    Computers are now so far ahead that there's a serious problem with cheating using a computer in chess competition, Several cheaters were caught at the 2006 World Open. [chessbase.com] "Two players are under suspicion of having received help from computers at the World Open in Philadelphia. One locked himself in a bathroom stall, the other, who was leading the event before the last round and stood to win $18,000, was caught wearing a "hearing aid" which turned out to be a wireless receiver used for surreptitious communications. The New York Times reports."

    Chess players at major tournaments are now being searched.

    • ...caught wearing a "hearing aid" which turned out to be a wireless receiver used for surreptitious communications.

      They did that way back in an episode of Cheers when Sam played a game against Robin Colcord. Norm was in the office calling out moves on the computer. And Rebecca caught him and thought he was just trying to erase his beer tab.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Frozen Void (831218)
      Fritz is relatively weak.Latest Rybka,ZapChessZ,And Hiarcs have top ratings spots.
      Here is fritz vs rybka stats
      Deep Fritz 10 4CPU(2925)
      Rybka 2.2 64-bit 4CPU(3105)
      5.5 24.5
      (+0-19=11).
  • Slow the computer down until it can process information at the maximum speed a human synapse can fire, and see who wins a timed chess match.

    • Slow the computer down until it can process information at the maximum speed a human synapse can fire, and see who wins a timed chess match.
      Unfair handicap. Among other things, human brains work massively in parallel, so synapse firing speed is not a reasonable comparison.
      • Yes, some compensation is required for that aspect, but it's not as if all those synapses can fire in support of solving a problem. In any case, there's no doubt that computers can perform operations much faster than humans. If not, we wouldn't be using them. The difference is reasoning which humans can do and computers cannot (so far). Speed and storage are responsible for the computer's win since there's really no other reasonable explanation.

  • Weird! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by localman (111171)
    This morning I was reading a different Slashdot article and came across this comment [slashdot.org], which led me to Wikipedia and in turn:
    • Robert Heinlein
    • Alfred Korzybski
    • General Semantics
    • Aristotlian Logic
    • Martin Gardner
    • Mathematical Games
    • Soma Cube
    • Pentomino
    • Solved Games
    • Endgame Tablebase
    • Computer Chess
    • Kasprov and this famous matchup

    Then I come back here and find this article. I don't know what my point is but I just love the semi-random nature of brain feeding on the internet. For more information:

    Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon [damninteresting.com]

    An [xkcd.com]

    • From your link:

      The reason for this is our brains' prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes th

  • Scientific American in 1992 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck (141947) on Tuesday May 15 2007, @11:52PM (#19141413)
    There was an article in Scientific American magazine circa 1992 that predicted that at some point a computer would have enough power to have every possible move stored up, and upon starting the game it would have immediately announed "Mate in X moves." As you continued to play, it would eliminate millions of games, while still counting down "Mate in X-1 moves.."

    Almost all chess programs now have an "opening library" of opening move strategies, so it's not that far to extend that library to 10-15-20-50-100 moves...

    • I'd venture a guess that chess is like Tic-Tac-Toe, in that optimal players would always draw. Since "mate in X" means there's no possible way to escape, I doubt the computer could show a count until you make your first mistake (probably in one or two moves).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by daveewart (66895)

      Almost all chess programs now have an "opening library" of opening move strategies, so it's not that far to extend that library to 10-15-20-50-100 moves...

      Actually it *is* a big deal to extend it: remember also that opening libraries are not necessarily *perfect* moves, they're just commonly-played and probably-OK moves. The opening book represents an incredibly small subset of all legal moves in the opening.

      If one assumes approximately 50 legal moves in any position during the opening (close enough f

    • Heh, I definitely hope to see the day when we have a chess "win or draw" algorithm. That is, you follow it, you win, unless the other player is also following it, in which case you draw.

      But as a side note ... computers could beat Kasparov in 1992 already. You just had to decrease the time allowed for moving to a fraction of a second. The computer would have no problem, while the human would have to play instantly.
    • This takes a lot more than brute-forcing. I think that the reason computers play chess so well more likely good search algorithms. According to the article, deep-blue is able to computer about 200,000,000 moves per second. If the strategy was a depth-first search of the state-space of chess (which have an average branching factor of 35) and all moves were considered, then deep-blue would only think about 5-6 moves ahead. I think Kasparov can do a bit better than that. However, not all moves are considere

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by QuantumG (50515)

        A lot of intelligent pruning techniques can be applied in chess.
        And that's what is worth studying (from an AI perspective).
      • Most things in the real world don't fit neatly into a discrete state space with a low branching factor. Board games are an exception. I fully admit this is heuristic, but I think it's somewhat unlikely to achieve an intelligence we would recognize as human with such a drastically different implementation. I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying I doubt we can do it with really fast graph search.
    • not a bad idea... while we're at it maybe it has to sit in a chair and move the pieces on the board itself using an arm resembling that of a human's. While that shouldn't be a very difficult task it would do much to take away from the the other more important calculations it will be running.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SystemFault (876435)
        Among other things, it would force programmers to do more with less -- always a valid engineering goal. It's one thing to build a chessplayer that needs multiple racks and a three phase 220 V power supply, and a much more impressive thing for a chessplayer running on a hand powered OLPC laptop.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dun Malg (230075)

      The amazing thing is that the computers only beat humans by looking at every single possibility. I think Deep Blue processed something like 200 million chess positions a second. But human grandmasters usually only consider 3 or 4 moves during their typical two-minutes of thinking.

      It only seems like grandmasters are only considering 3 or 4 moves. What you're missing is the fact that they can, at a glance, take in the current state of the game and instantly dismiss several million avenues of consideration based on past analysis and current variations.

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