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10 Years After Big Blue Beat Garry Kasparov
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Aug 15, 2007 08:10 AM
from the what-does-it-mean-man dept.
from the what-does-it-mean-man dept.
Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.
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the supercomputers advantage... (Score:2, Informative)
Problem is, it heats up under load.
Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:4, Informative)
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As I understand it, the humans provided patterns of moves that were historically proven to be strong ones. I suspect that if you gave big blue as many years (and sufficient storage) to chew on the problem as most of the human grand masters have, it would come up with some amazing opening sequences on its own.
Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this "highly suspect"? I suppose you might think so if you made the mistake of believing that Kasparov was actually playing against a piece of hardware (the "computer"); but of course he wasnt. Kasparov was playing against a team of chess-knowledgeable programmers; Kasparov was playing against software. The only remarkable thing about the computer itself was its speed--it was fast enough to carry out the laborious recursive brute-force searches for optimal moves in about the same time as a human player would take to decide his move. In theory, you could have done the same thing with a 70s era computer...but the game would have taken forever.
I'm not a chess player, but it's my understanding that during important tournaments, players often talk to advisers to determine their strategy in the next game against a tough opponent. How is this different from the programmers tweaking the software between games? Fundamentally, this was a contest between Kasparov and a team of programmers. Kasparov surely knew that, and accepted the match under those conditions. So I don't think the IBM team can be accused of "cheating".
The fact that such accusations have been made shows how people--even the paranormal crowd that posts to /.--easily forget how computers and computer software work. Once you remind yourself that this is not a case of "man vs. machine", then the philosophical significance of the contest wanes. Computers do not play chess...only people do.
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Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:5, Informative)
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Since they kept tweaking the program even between games it wasn't possible for Kasparov to do the same. And then there's the way the computer has the first 20 or so moves ( a LOT more than the typical chess program of the day) already precalculated and didn't need to use time on its clock to whip out the next perfect move.
Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I know no explanation for the strange uncharacteristic move was given by IBM, and deep blue didn't make any other startlingly non computer like moves for the rest of the tournament. It's a rather interesting puzzle.
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Re:the supercomputers advantage... (Score:5, Funny)
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lol (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I know, the major difficulty in writing a strong go playing program isn't the search space, but the fact that there are so many opposing aims that it's very hard to write a good heuristic. For instance, players have to decide wether to go for speed or security in their play. Deciding whether to expand territory quickly and risk invasion, or to build up a small stronghold is a major factor in the game.
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Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
As a result, recent advances in Go-playing programs have actually come simply because a new "evaluation function" has arisen: random play. When you get to the end of your search tree, to evaluate whether a move is good or not, you simply randomly play a bunch of games starting at that position, with random moves by both sides, and see what happens. It's a pretty dumb "evaluation function", and isn't really even very static (so it's much slower than, say, most chess evaluation functions), but it has still resulted in a reasonable increase in program strength.
Dlugar
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Hans Berliner: ``Backgammon computer program beats world champion''
Artificial intelligence 14 (1980), 205-220
Hans Berliner: ``Computer Backgammon''
Scientific American 243:1, 64-72 (1980)
I remember reading the Sci Am one in high school; excellent article if you can find a copy--Berliner is/was (still alive?) quite an authority on computer chess as well.
tempus fugit (Score:2, Interesting)
Summary (Score:3, Informative)
"10 years ago Kasparov was beaten by a computer. The computer used a brute force searching method that pruned a lot of move trees. How do you know Kasparov's brain didn't do the same thing? The only clear difference is that humans can be intimidated, but that's not to humans' credit. Oh, and Fisher Random chess is designed to force more computational power to be used during the game rather than before."
What is "intelligence" (Score:5, Insightful)
I did an AI degree in the mid 90s and one of the things we covered was the definition of intelligence. After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else...
Actually, my favourite definition of intelligence, partly because of its succinctness, is "productive laziness".
Peter
Re:What is "intelligence" (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but I think that's just a special case of the general rule that, "People don't like when their expertise is systematized so that others can easily gain it." (Probably a better way to say that.)
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Re:What is "intelligence" (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, how do you see a trail as it winds over grassland and leads into the woods? How does one see a year old trail that is partially overgrown, or a new trail not completely tramped down. How do you track down an animal from smattering of scat, nibbles and tracks over rocks, dirt, grassland, and the tree line? How does a human being see a camouflaged predator slinking behind the tree line? How do you read the sky and know what the weather will be later that day? How do you look at a river and know if it's crossable or not? Back at home, how do you play your relatives, friends, and enemies in the tribe so that you are elected leader when the Big Man passes away? Or how do you manage to convince your husband that your new pregnancy is his, and not your secret lovers'?
Computers seem to be like idiot savants. They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books. That's a very useful tool in our technological society, but I don't think it's the basis of human intelligence. Like some Autistic person, computers suck as the basics of social interaction, which any three year old understands the basic concepts of. I remember my friend's three year old putting on her parents clothes and getting dressed up when she heard that her parents were going to a Halloween party -- all without prompting. What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'? Or simple thinks like standing on two legs or filling a glass of water -- never mind hunting and eating another animal, or following a trail.
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I am a Bolo Mark V of the line. Bolo uses radar, lasers, sonar, GPS, and satellited imagery.
How does one see a year old trail that is partially overgrown, or a new trail not completely tramped down.
Bolo does not care. Bolo tank treads crush all terrain obstacles. That which cannot be overcome is destroyed with main gun.
How do you track down an animal from smattering of scat, nibbles and tracks over rocks, dirt, grasslan
Re:What is "intelligence" (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What is "intelligence" (Score:4, Funny)
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This strikes me as a much fairer way to judge intelligence than looking for things entirely specific to human development.
You think that communicating over text is a better proof of general intelligence than hunting? I would guess that more intelligent animals ( both at home an extra-terrestrially ) hunt than carry on deep conversations. I would say that holding deep conversations via some kind of text message medium is *more* specific to human development than hunting or migrating across a planet.
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Really, Turing was saying that if you can't distinguish between entities you consider intelligent and those you do not solely by communicating with them, your definition o
It is a game of logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, please. The hubris is overwhelming.
I play the game. I am not a great players, but it is a fun diversion and can help to develop focus and thinking skills. But, please, to say that Chess could have been beyond a computer? That is small, ignorant thinking.
The human brain excels at pattern matching in massive parallelism. It is this advantage we have over our current computers. But, new computer designs have gotten fast and with lotsa memory and storage space. It was only a matter of time until a computer had the right amounts of that speed, memory and storage space, coupled with programmers to make the best use of it and then no human would ever stand a chance.
As we get better with fuzzy AI type stuff, even games like Poker, Texas Hold 'em and others will even fall from our human hands.
The intuition we exercise is some random choice being made, but based on experience and a factor of acceptable risk of failure.
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess? (Score:3, Funny)
Some of the problems. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Computer doesn't care it is just focusing on the game 100% it is not even conserned if it is breathing or not overheating or a person behind it with a gun to shoot it if it looses. It is just running a set of processes, and using its memory to play the game.
Re:Some of the problems. (Score:4, Insightful)
and more to the point, the computer doesn't even know what chess is. It's just adding, subtracting, fetching instructions from memory, etc. It's kind of like how a guy in a box doesn't really understand chinese, or how none of your brain cells actually know what slashdot is.
I wonder if it would be more accurate to say that a system, which included a computer as one of its parts, but also included a human programmer, beat Kasparov. Kind of like how it's not accurate to say that a few neurons and muscle fibers posted to slasdot. My brain cells and my fingers don't know what they're doing, any more than Big Blue knew what it was doing.
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This article would be more relevant if (Score:5, Insightful)
After it was discovered that IBM was tinkering using chess experts (that is, humans) to tinker with its software between matches, they're personae non gratae in the chess world now.
Re:This article would be more relevant if (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This article would be more relevant if (Score:5, Informative)
KInd of puts all the whining and cries of foul play (especially the ones that specifically say "cheated") into perspective. If Kasparov knew what he was getting into he can't complain about the outcome.
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A chess player's take on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Chess is said to be "solvable". My understanding is that it can be proven mathematically that chess has a finite series of moves. If this is correct, then at some point computers will be powerful enough to be able win every game because they'll be able to analyze every possible opening all the way to the end and only pick the moves that will win. No human will ever be able to duplicate this feat. So it is inevitable that computers will eventually be unbeatable. I think just a few weeks ago Slashdot had an article that a computer program has been designed that is now at the point where it cannot lose at checkers - ever. Checkers is quite a bit less complex than chess and it has only now been solved. Whether it takes 10, 20, 50 or more years to solve chess, the day will come when computers simply cannot be beaten at chess under the current rules.
Should we care? Well, maybe not. Computers are better than humans at a lot of things, like mathematical calculations, so it's inevitable that they will be better than humans at chess. The downside is that once all chess games are solvable, it will ruin chess at the professional level. It will make it almost impossible for any game to be postponed until the next day because once there is a postponement, a player could, in theory, simply use a PC to analyze his game and find a sequence of moves where he cannot lose if he plays them correctly. At that point, there's no more human element in the game - it's simply a matter who can more accurately remember computer analysis. Computers ruined chess for me in the early 1990s. Can you imagine how much worse things are now? And how much worse they will be when the day comes that everybody can use a PC to analyze his game and find a way to never lose? At that point, I suspect that either chess will change to Fischer Random Chess as mentioned in the article or people who would have played chess will simply move on and play the game of go instead. Go is beyond the ability of current computers to solve and even the best computer programs can't beat strong human players.
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Hate to break it to you, but "No [anything computational] will ever be able to duplicate this feat.", Machines or otherwise. This is due to th
Re:A chess player's take on this (Score:4, Informative)
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The Best Chess (Score:4, Interesting)
They are fearless, uncompromising, untiring. The games are far more interesting than human efforts. Check out some Rybka vs. ZapZanzibar matches (the number 1 program vs. the number 2 program). Incredible play.
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dennett's Dubious Proposition (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).
Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game [chessgames.com] in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game [chessgames.com] of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.
Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as
Dr. David Gelernter's response, back in 1997 (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,986355,0
Dennett is a brilliant philosopher, but he's also well-known for propounding a particular agenda. While his view is plausible, it is not intrinsically more plausible than Gelernter's view.
By dwelling on the functional equivalence of Deep Blue chess and Kasparov chess, Dennett skillfully lays the assumption that this is the correct way to compare all differences between humans and machines. Rhetoric like "as far as we know" quietly asserts that all right-thinking intellectuals agree with him, while argument is dismissed as "cling[ing]... to brittle visions."
However, both his view and Gelernter's are merely expressions of the consequences of certain prior assumptions, and these assumptions are unprovable ones: function vs. being, for instance, or philosophical naturalism vs. methodological naturalism.
Gelernter adequately illustrates a counter-view that many of Dennett's peers would hold:
"...the idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind? It can win at chess, but not because it wants to. It isn't happy when it wins or sad when it loses. What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov? Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town? It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose."
"The more powerful your computer, the more sophisticated the behavior it can imitate. In the long run I doubt if there is any kind of human behavior computers can't fake, any kind of performance they can't put on. It is conceivable that one day, computers will be better than humans at nearly everything. I can imagine that a person might someday have a computer for a best friend. That will be sad--like having a dog for your best friend but even sadder.
"Computers might one day be capable of expressing themselves in vivid prose or fluent poetry, but unfortunately they will still be computers and have nothing to say. The gap between human and surrogate is permanent and will never be closed. Machines will continue to make life easier, healthier, richer and more puzzling. And human beings will continue to care, ultimately, about the same things they always have: about themselves, about one another and, many of them, about God. On those terms, machines have never made a difference. And they never will."
Dennett might not be wrong, but he might not be right.
--
Dum de dum.
Re:Chess is a bad example of thinking (Score:5, Funny)
- When Is The Most Irritating Time To Crash
It also enjoys
- Fatal Exception Blocking The Save Function
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
#include
int main(){
do {
std::cout move_that_provides_the_most_possible_ways_of_winni ng() std::endl;
} while(!check_mate());
}
master_chess_program.cpp: In function 'int main()':
master_chess_program.cpp:5: error: 'move_that_provides_the_most_possible_ways_of_winn ing' was not declared in this scope
master_chess_program.cpp:6: error: 'check_mate' was not declared in this scope
Maybe I am missing some header files?
Re:not really AI (Score:5, Informative)
While it was impressive to have a computer win against the "chess master" it accomplished this task by looking ahead as many board configurations as possible....
There in is why many who play chess don't take this match seriously.
Some flaws, first to play a grand master you need to qualify and play others. Then you enter a tournament and build up to play. This leave a trail of your style of play, your weaknesses and your strengths. A true match, your opponent would study your last games before he moved the first piece!
In this case, it was completely bypassed, placing the single player against machine at a disadvantage. Should it have been a real tournament play, I suspect the machine would have done well but lost. And there was one game I watched where he lost and he was either having a bad day or tossed it.
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Re:It Didn't Mean Anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It's almost trivial to make a program 'learn' from mistakes. Just store some negative value for that specific decision-point. Depends on your definition of 'learning', of course. But the principle is the same in humans and AI
2. Kasparov also adjusted his style (i believe there are certain playing-styles that are beneficial when playing against an AI), and i bet he had coaches and consultants
3. So what?
4. See above.
My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is. I bet if you'd tell somebody 100 years ago that a machine would be the world's best chess player, that alone would have been enough to consider the machine 'intelligent of sorts'. But as soon as we know how it works, it somehow looses the right to be called 'intelligent' (mechanical turk). I think this is because it seems to hurt humans that AI shows them that whatever gives us the right to call ourselves 'intelligent' is nothing more than the result of zillions of relatively simple interactions of little protein-machines.
IIRC (its been a while) the best way to determine what language a given text is written in, is amazingly 'stupid': just compare the ratio of how many times the different characters appear. The result is still amazing and should be considered 'kind of intelligent'.
So, just give AI some kudos, accept that there's a lot left to be done, and that the heuristics dint really matter, as long as the result is cool. (and please dont give me none of that Chinese Room Argument crap)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
First: Chessboxing [wikipedia.org]
Also, the quote:
"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing."