Brain vs. Computer: Place Your Bets

dev_null_ziggy writes: "CNN reports that the current chess guru is going up against a supercomputer, amusingly titled 'Deep Fritz.' The match is scheduled for October, and the current champion, Vladimir Kramnik, stands to win $1 Million dollars if he wins. Of course, since he'll be snagging $800k for a draw, and $600k for a loss ... I'll give two to one odds on the machine."

Re:Not unusual

[stilwebm]

I knew I should have been a professional chess player. The fame. The glory. The money. None of those disabling injuries I get in professional football. Sure, the cheerleaders aren't as hot, but major media coverage should help me get women anyway.

What if Deep Fritz wins?

[kiwaiti]

Will he get a million, too?

Or will it all go to his "owner" again?

I hate to think theres still no one concerned about us machines, our desires, needs, and pursuit of happiness.

Kiwaiti

Deep Thought

[Jedi Binglebop]

Deep Thought could beat Deep Fritz and Deep Blue with Marvin tied behind his back! (So there!)

-JB.

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It's not humanity on trial, it's the game of Chess

[Uggy]

Really all these exercises are just research into whether or not chess is a sophisticated version of Tic Tac Toe. As long as human's beat computers in chess the jury is out... on the game of chess not humanity.

As long as we think that chess==life then we're going to be upsetting ourselves needlessly. Computers outdo humans everyday in a wide variety of ways, but they still can't feed themselves, fix themselves, or reproduce without our help. Hell, they still need humans to actually move the chess pieces. Bah! that's not the chess I grew up with.

No, you took your hand off, that's a move. No I didn't, I was just testing. Cheater!!!! Mom!!!!

Re:And, upon checkmating the machine, a cry is hea

[tmark]

Now, for a REAL computational challenge, make a computer that can play Magic, the Gathering worth a darn. Talk about "limited information" - you don't know what cards the other player has, you may not know the powers of the cards, and you may not even know what's coming up in your deck next. Make a machine that plays that well and I'll be impressed.

This is a bad idea. If you write a program that plays "Magic, the Gathering" well it will get beaten up and overwritten by other, cooler programs that don't want to have such loser programs in the same address space. Not to mention the fact that you will be fair game to every bully on your block. Hell, regular "Magic, the Gathering" players may well be entitled to beat you up...you would be that low on the totem pole.

Why does anyone care?

[alexjohns]

Look, we're all geeks here. We understand computers. Chess can be won by pure computing power alone. A semi-good algorithm with enough speed to look 10 moves ahead - every possible combination - will win over a human being. Maybe it's 12 moves. Maybe 15. Doesn't matter. Enough cycles per second and you don't have to have a very good algorithm.

There are so many things we humans can do that we haven't even begun to figure out how to make computers able to do. True intelligence in computers is a long way off.

Me: "Hey, computer, last night at the club I was at, there was this really hot chick with red leather pants, get her number for me."
Computer: "There were 3 ladies with red leather pants at the club last night. Which one should I search for?"
Me: "The one with black hair, sitting at the bar, drinking some red slushy drink with two of those tiny little straws, looking like she wanted me real bad."
Computer: "Oh, that one. Not really your type, but I'll see what I can do."

Imagine what that computer has to be able to do. Scan through the video of the club; identify individual people; correlate the image from the video with images from other cameras; find out where she lives or works from that (likely work - less privacy there); somehow get from there to her phone number. (I don't know how - if you get here home address, you can just hack into a utility company's database. If at work, hack into their phone list. Get her name from an audio feed somewhere. Doesn't matter.)

That's the kind of things we should be working on. Because I really need that phone number.

Machine loses....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hacked by Chinese!

It has to be...

[DrMyke]

I bet the computer is an Amiga.