Can a Bayesian Spam Filter Play Chess? 204
martin-boundary writes "The typical Bayesian spam filters learn to distinguish ham from spam just by reading thousands of emails, but is this all they can do?
This essay shows step by step how to teach a Bayesian filter to play chess against a human, on Linux, with
XBoard."
Results? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The point? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it can't (well) (Score:5, Interesting)
The premise of a Bayesian filter is that is learns sequences of words, or characters, or whatever. Spam-chess learns sequences of moves. This premise is wrong, since good moves are related to complete board positions, not to what was done in the previous few moves.
Of course, the longer your string of moves is, the better it will represent the board position, especially during the opening phase of the game. And the example the article provides of reasonable play of spam-chess, is actually from the game's opening, where the learned sequences indeed represent the complete game.
For the middle game, however, spam chess will perform badly, always.
But, as I said before, the idea is quite a lot of fun. I enjoyed reading the article. You can learn a lot from it, both about spam filtering and about chess.
Pie in the sky (Score:3, Interesting)
It makes sense. If something so utterly trivial (compared to the human brain) as a spam filter could learn do something as complex as play chess (well), then our brain would be a whole lot smaller. Nature doesn't waste resources.
But hey, it might always make an interesting screen saver!
Re:A poor reinvention of the wheel..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Old proverb (Score:5, Interesting)
teaching it to understand the board (Score:4, Interesting)
The method described in the article ignores the board, and instead focusses on the history of moves.
A better method might be to train the filter to read from a description of the board state (ignoring the moves taken to reach that state), and a list of possible moves, then return the move that is most likely to win.
If you allow it to also choose from impossible moves, then it will learn the rules of the game as well.
Re:teaching it to understand the board (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be more interesting, would be to feed in all of the known openings and closings that have been analyzed and collected over the years (comprehensive books on openings run over 750 pages in length). If you could teach it various openings, and then the various defenses to each opening, it might be a lot stronger than simply teaching it by random examples of past games.
Re:Be very careful! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But can a Bayesian filter play basketball? (Score:2, Interesting)
Think of the money that could saved by replacing the humans that presently presently do the same.