Humans Hold Off the Machines... For Now

Murr writes "The six game match between Gary Kasparov and the Deep Junior program ended in a draw today. Kasparov won game 1 and lost game 3 to a blunder, while the other 4 games were drawn. While the quality of play was not outstanding, after the recent matches of Kramnik and Kasparov against commercial programs running on (high end) commodity hardware, it's becoming apparent that chess programs are getting quite competitive with top human players."

Kasparov played cautiously...

[$$$$$exyGal]

I've been keeping track of those games, and what I found most amazing was that Kasparov played so cautiously. If the last game he played would have been against a human player (who played the same moves), I don't think he would have accepted the draw. It seems he accepted the draw because he was psychologically spent, especially when thinking of his loss to Deep Blue several years ago.

--naked [slashdot.org]

loosing game in a blunder ...

[porky_pig_jr]

is part of the whole game, isn't it? And this is where machine has a good potential. A human can improvise but also make the mistakes. Machine follows the program and can't improvise, but it also can't make a 'blunder'. So the bottom line is that the fact that both games were lost 'in a blunder' is no excuse. A draw is a draw is a draw.

Re:Why did he offer a draw?

[tapin]

The post-match interview explained this a bit -- basically, Kasparov psyched himself out in that fifteen minutes, trying to determine if the rook sacrifice was the blunder that would cost him the match, since Junior can capitalize on mistakes better than a human can (or so Kasparov claimed).

Even though he was in a much stronger position, he was spent; worrying about whether the next move would be the move that cost him the match, and made him the two-time world-champion loser-of-a-major-computer-match.

He agreed to a draw a few moves later once Junior et al realized they were in an extremely weak position.

Seems to me it was a pretty wussy way to end it. Junior got lucky. If you're up five runs in the fourth, you still don't pray for rain even if the other team's got a monster closer.

Wrong

[tpengster]

chess is nice, but most progresses in chess have been due to speed increases in hardware and optimizations, hence allowing the computer to overpower the human with depth of search.

Because search is exponential, speed increases in hardware won't have much effect on search depth. For example, it might take a 1000-fold increase in speed to increase search depth by 2. The real improvements have been in better search algorithms, heuristics, and tuned evaluation functions. Chess is easier than go for two reasons: 1) the branching factor is a lot smaller, so less to search; 2) evaluation is MUCH easier.

Re:Kasprov chickened out

[los furtive]

Surely a chess computer is only as good as the person who programmed it?

That's a rather short sighted view. By your equation, Kasparov could have played the programmer, rather than the computer, and the outcome would have been similar. And who is to say that the computer doesn't have the ability to play mind games...if there are 10 ways to win the match based on the current layout, who is to say the computer will take the path with the least amount of moves? Who is to say it will always take Kasparov's bait.

Re:Quality of play

[Scarblac]

"While the quality of play was not outstanding"

Just what are we comparing this to?

Kasparov's own standards. Especially the mistake he made that made him lose one game, as well as the way he was surprised in the opening in game 5, are examples of Kasparov playing below his very best level.

The cliche answer would be to say that Kasparov isn't as good against computers because he can't use his intimidating presence, and he has to be more careful than usual because a computer's style is a good fit to defend against Kasparov's attacks.

On the other hand, Kramnik's cliched image is the exact opposite, and he also drew a computer, so whatever :-)

Re:mandatory go plug

[GlassHeart]

chess is nice, but most progresses in chess have been due to speed increases in hardware and optimizations, hence allowing the computer to overpower the human with depth of search. On top of that, the evaluation functions are rather primitive

Deep Blue had 418 processors, and evaluated 200 million positions per second.

Deep Junior has eight processors, and evaluates 3 million moves per second.

More importantly, your point is irritatingly raised every time a computer chess article comes up. Your calculator doesn't actually know even how to add two numbers. Instead, it uses bitwise logic operators, so that the result looks like it added the two numbers. So what? Even the cheapest calculator can add non-trivial numbers more quickly and more accurately than any human.

It does not matter how Deep Junior comes up with the moves to tie the best human player in the world, in a match that Kasparov ensured was fair. It's Kasparov's advantage that he can think in the abstract. It's Deep Junior's advantage that it can make many simple calculations very quickly. Asking Deep Junior to play like Kasparov is exactly like asking Kasparov to play like Deep Junior.