16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress 183
vmartell writes "The 16th World Computer Chess Championship is now in progress in Beijing, as part of the Computer Games Championship. Currently in the lead are Rybka 3.0, recognized as the world's strongest chess engine and Hiarcs, another commercial engine. Another curiosity is a Java ME based engine running on a Nokia phone, which is currently being trounced by the other engines. A very interesting sideline: before the computer tournament, a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka. The result? Rybka won both games!"
Women's grandmaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does chess really need to separate the rankings between male and female champions? Isn't this a sport that gender really doesn't factor in?
Re:The human aspect (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Boring (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Women's grandmaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a bit mistaken.
The intellectual abilities of both men and women are essentially equal. The key differentiation between the cognitive abilities of men and women is that men are able to confront a problem by breaking things down into smaller parts and focus on solving those to form a complete solution while the minds of women take problems holistically and solve based on tradeoffs between different sections of a problem area.
This would seem to benefit women chess players, but the fact is that chess is a game with many intricacies and the ability to analyze at the micro level (as in visualizing x number of steps ahead) is a critical skill. To take the game holistically works fine at the lower levels (and may be a superior form of cognition for those levels) because a full understanding of the game as an exhibition of ebb and flow gives various insights that a purely logical player would not apprehend immediately. What is clear, though, is that male chess grand champions are able to apprehend the holistic game while female chess grand champions are not able to make the jump to pure logic and focus.
This is the unfortunate truth about the split in chess rankings. It is also why men won't stop for directions when lost and women are able to care for families so well.
Re:Women's grandmaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a controversial topic - while men clearly excel in physical sports, the mean intelligence of men and women are approximately the same. Often, apparent differences in intelligence (e.g. income) have societal explanations.
On the other hand, some experiments (http://www.polymath-systems.com/intel/essayrev/sexdiff.html) indicate that the variance in intelligence is greater in men: there are more very smart men than women, but also more very stupid men. Chess, a game that very smart people excel at, tends to be dominated by men. It's not that gender factors into the game per se, but the same could be said for football.
That said, the article summary "a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka; the result? Rybka won both games!" is probably a troll because Rybka could beat any human; but I still chuckled...
Re:Women's grandmaster? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never considered income to be directly proportional to intelligence. It's kind of a bell curve. The smartest people are in the middle and probably get paid about right - management and unskilled labourers tend to get paid amounts quite disproportionate to the amount of work they do or how intelligent they are. Chess skill isn't directly related to intelligence (as in generally accepted IQ 'intelligence' - there are plenty of different types of intelligence recognised in Psychology) anyway - a highly intelligent man who hasn't ever played chess before would probably lose to a girl of average intelligence, as long as the child has a lot of experience.
the article summary "a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka; the result? Rybka won both games!" is probably a troll because Rybka could beat any human
Exactly.
Re:Boring (Score:5, Insightful)
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Go is considerably more difficult than chess because of how the game moves around the board. It isn't the branching factor per se, but the fact that weaknesses left behind sometimes won't get exploited until as far as 100 or even 200 moves later on. In the meantime, players will try to direct the game in such a way that they can exploit the opponent's weaknesses while protecting their own. Also, the other way around, make use of their strength while preventing the opponent from making use of his.
Without a higher level concept of the board, it is impossible for a computer to understand such ideas, and reading doesn't help because the depth is simply to deep. Monte Carlo bots try by playing out lots of complete game variations rapidly to get a somewhat understanding of the board, but in the end it fails because such playouts are overly simplistic.
This isn't to say that go computers won't beat us someday, but it will be tougher than chess. Also, one point you made stands out to me as arguing for go, even if computers become better.
To even competitively play at the local club level you really need a ridiculously deep memorization of openings and endings. At the grandmaster level, they've basically memorized the tables used by computers.
Due to how go works, memorization isn't nescessary to the same degree. Of course, having some common sequences memorized helps, but in general it is better to have a generic idea about different patterns as to understand the strategic and tactical implications of moves.
While there are established patterns (joseki) that are used in corners, players often deviate from them based on how the rest of the board looks. And when that happens, knowing the joseki is not very useful except to tell you that the player deviated from it. That is why there is a common saying "learn joseki, lose two stones: forget joseki, improve three stones".
Those confined to memorized patterns lose to those with more open minds. Still, studying some joseki is useful, because it helps to broaden you view on what good and bad patterns are.
Re:Boring Verbs. (Score:3, Insightful)
We have a number of algorithmic approaches to attack games. Many of them can't work in reasonable time on games with large search space. This is not simply a matter of hardware. There are more possible games of Go (on a standard 19x19 board, rather than the beginners 9x9 board that recent computers have done well on) then there are atoms in the universe. You couldn't even build a memory to store the possibilities. An exhastive search of connect 4 is possible, an exhastive search of Go is simply not (without a breakthrough in computing similar to the magnitude of the invention of the computer).
Other techniques show promise and may offer paths to go down, so I'm not saying a good computer standard go player will never happen, but the game theory complexity of Go is an entirely different magnitude to the game theory complexity of Chess, and the vague notion so many people have that if you throw enough hardware and research at a computing problem you will solve it is simply naive.
Re:Boring Verbs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer go players are now one Dan, and rising
Give me an example of one go bot that has been able to maintain 1 dan over a longer period of time on a go server. Crazystone is the best I have seen, and while it did jump into 1d for a short time, it quickly went back to 1k again where it has been steadily for quite a while.
Also, they don't seem to be improving that much right now. They did have a big breakthrough when Monte Carlo algorithms were introduced, and a little more with using improved processors power to maximize the monte carlo brute forcing. But the problems are now beginning to show, and that is that brute force is still brute force even if it is using a more appropriate version for go.
pros can't beat Mogo with 9 stones anymore.
The two rematches with 7 stones didn't go so well though. The pro beat MoGo in both. The game records were quite embarrasing including a total blunder from MoGos side.
On the other hand, crazystone won an 8 handicap game vs a pro.
Still, I don't find these games vs pros very interesting. Lots of even games vs amateurs is what should be used to judge strength. High handicap games simply don't scale linearly enough to give any good indication of rating, and are in general to variable in result (meaning you need more games to get an accurate result), because they rely on the mistake of the weaker player, more than the strength of the stronger player.
Re:Boring (Score:3, Insightful)
How does this shit get modded interesting?
Chess has become boring, like checkers or backgammon.
Then don't play it. I find it boring too, but I don't look down on people who enjoy it, just as I would hope that they wouldn't look down on me for my interests.
To even competitively play at the local club level you really need a ridiculously deep memorization of openings and endings. At the grandmaster level, they've basically memorized the tables used by computers.
Really? You mean people who put effort into learning the game are better at it?! How unfair!!!
PROTIP: You should play chess with people of similar abilities to you, not grandmasters.
Average games of chess only last around 60 moves. The depth of opening and closing books increasingly has reduced the middle game of actually interesting play. If it's not down to only 1-5 moves, it will be soon.
Just untrue. Opening books are getting bigger, but endtables can only just manage 6 pieces. It takes a lot more than five moves to get from the end of an opening to a position with only 6 men on the board.
The game will be dead--or at least not interesting enough to be seriously played--long before it is solved.
Bollocks. It might transform the way that it's played at the top level, but it will have little to no effect on two amateurs playing against each other.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
And just in case people hadn't realised you were an arrogant wanker, you throw in an insult to another group of hobbyists! Way to go! It will be a long time before computers get good at Go and even when they do, it won't affect human players because of reasons I've given above.
Re:Boring Verbs. (Score:1, Insightful)
> There are more possible games of Go (on a
> standard 19x19 board, rather than the beginners
> 9x9 board that recent computers have done well
> on)then there are atoms in the universe. You
> couldn't even build a memory to store the
> possibilities
The same is true for chess. Very big numbers involved in both games.
But we don't need to "solve" both games to completely crush any human being alive 100% of the time, this will be achieved shortly for both games.
Regardless of that, chess is still fun for me, I have no plans to compete against the last generation of computers/algorithms, just want a good sparring, slightly above my level (most chess programs allow you to tune the strength of play) so I can practice and enjoy when a fellow human is not around.
- Regards
Re:The human aspect (Score:4, Insightful)
With something like Deep Blue, most of the skill did come from the programmers, it's true. Most of Deep Blue's "intelligence" came from brute-forcing its way through each move. However, since it would take billions of years to work that out, they made sure to shrink the search space; they "taught" Deep Blue about the most common Grand-Master level opening moves, the most desirable end games, and how to recognize unfavorable situations without having to expand the entire tree.
What they effectively taught (or began to teach) Deep Blue was rudimentary pattern recognition-- knowing how a board is going to turn out without having to figure it out on the fly. And really, that's the more interesting bit, because that is exactly what human players do.
When a Grand Master plays a game, there are certainly situations where they are working out a game tree that is a few layers deep. But the limitations of the human brain simply won't allow him to work out an entire tree, or even every move in one layer. It's beyond human wetwear. But what isn't is pattern recognition. The Grand Master has spent hundreds of days pre-processing the information; he's played thousands of games, read books on theory, watched other matches, and so forth. He already knows, for example, leaving a King exposed is going to turn out bad. He can see that positions of his pieces around an opponent's weakness leave for only a small subset of desirable moves (even though there are thousands of possible moves). He can recognize when a subset of moves would be very bad for him and instantly eliminate them without expanding the tree to his inevitable defeat. This instant recognition leaves free cycles for evaluating on-the-fly decisions about the current situation.
A human Grand Master's neural net has been trained to recognize good and bad patters just as surely as anyone else has been trained to recognize hot pan = pain without having to stop and think about it, and that a can of soup needs to be open to be delicious without having to mentally invent the can opener.
The other advantage a human player has over a machine is that our hardware is much, much better. We've got more gigahertz all up ins ours-- and we have the advantage of an amazingly well trained and time-tested neural net built in.
But with enough advancement in computing-- from massively complex neural nets, to distributed computing, to quantum computing, and even better manufacturing techniques to ram more Giga-giga-giga hertz onto a slab of silicone, it's only a matter of time until computers have equal or superior hardware.
From there, it's just a matter of designing a computer that can learn, and giving it the online records of every regulation chess match ever played, and letting it figure out how to be the Grandest Master. Once its learning is in place, it's trivial to copy and redistribute that knowledge.
As for a computer starting with a blank slate and learning the concepts of game, board, opponent, horse, touch, feel, love-- well, that's just an abstraction of the same problem. It's a longer way off, but if a perfect, learning Chess computer is inevitable, why not that?
BTW, highly recommended reading on this topic, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. It also has a bibliography of a few hundred other excellent follow-ups.
Re:Women's grandmaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're also slightly mathematically mistaken because intellectual abilities between two populations are not directly comparable without any summary statistics.
If you take the "average" or "median" of intellectual abilities of all men, and the average of intellectual abilities of all women, they're essentially equal.
However, a greater "variance" among men's intelligence (or ability by any measurement, for that matter), means that there are more men at both ends of the spectrum.
All other points regarding compartmentalizing, tradeoffs, micro level, asking for directions, caring for families, etc. are observations totally irrelevant to chess at best, folklores or stereotypes at worst.
Why Go is better than Chess (Score:3, Insightful)
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
This is obviously trolling, but what the heck. Chess has been dominated by computers for quite some time now - many have moved on to Go, and they still fail to beat amateur-level Go players. There are practical reasons why a Go AI is more difficult to program than a Chess one, which I'm sure by the time this has been posted will be explained in great detail by other replies.
What I want to explain is why Go is better than Chess. It is not because it is more difficult for computers. While Chess doesn't really scale well, Go can be scaled down quite nicely to where the number of moves that have to be read out is equivalent to that of a Chess game. On 9x9 boards, Go AIs are rapidly catching up to humans. MoGo, for instance, consistently beats many amateur-level go players on 9x9's. There is more lost in the transition to a smaller board than simply brute-force reading, but the example still stands.
The reason Go is better than Chess is that unlike Chess much of it's depth is a natural, mathematical result of the very simple rule set. Essentially the entire game:
Players take turns placing pieces on the board. When a piece or group of pieces by one team is surrounded (ie, no empty spaces touching any of them in the group), the pieces are removed from the board. Whoever controls the majority of the board at the end wins.
There are details missing there about things such as defining who controls the majority of the board, but with one exception (ko) that's really all the game is. Everything, all of it's depth, is a mathematical result. Interesting patterns emerge, comparable to things like prime numbers or pi. For example: From the rules I put above it should quickly become apparent that I could just surround the opponents pieces that surrounded mine, and my opponent could do the same. No piece would ever really be safe, or ever really be captured that could not be replaced. No rules had to be made to remedy this: go naturally has a system in place where pieces cannot be captured. It's just plain cool. (See: "eyes").
For the most part, Go is not about brute-force reading so much as recognizing and understanding the patterns. I don't have to mathematically derive the formula for the area of a circle each time I need to calculate it - once I understand the concept I can retain it. Go is very similar. That's not to say there is no brute-force reading. For example: one of the interesting phenomenon in Go is the "ladder," which results in one player chasing the other across the board diagonally. The winner will be determined based on whose pieces (if any) are met along the way. As a result, people just read out the very simple pattern across the board rather than playing the whole thing out.
Go isn't flawless. There is a situation (ko) which essentially breaks the game. It's comparable to where in Chess if both players repeatedly make the same moves the game becomes a draw. There had to be rules added to deal with this situation, and while they do add even more depth and change the way the game is played, it is an area where Go's awesome depth-through-simplicity is marred.
I recognize that Chess does have some depth to it other than just brute-force reading. There are concepts like pinning which result from the rules, but they're far fewer and generally not as interesting. There's also many concepts which carry between the two, such as Go's sente/gote vs Chess's tempo.
Go is less about reading than it is about understanding. This, combine with the cool patters and concepts which emerge, is why Go is better than Chess. This is largely opinion; someone who plays Go is not necessarily a better, smarter person than someone who plays Chess. It is possible for an intelligent, healthy, mentally-stable human to prefer Chess's convoluted rules, simpler concepts and overwhelming amounts of brute-force reading. They'd just be silly for it.
Re:Boring Verbs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Boring (Score:3, Insightful)
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
They have already been trying to crack Go for decades now, but Go has not yielded as easily to the game tree search methods and position value functions as Chess did. The number of possible boards that can occur in Chess is thought to be around 10^40, with substantial reductions possible by applying chess specific knowledge and taking advantage of the properties of the game of Chess, whereas the number of boards that could occur in Go is orders of magnitude more, perhaps 1.74×10^172, and tends to stay constant throughout the game (the number of available moves does not generally decrease much as play progresses as it tends to do in Chess) which is many more boards than there are atoms in the universe (for a more complete discussion of the computational complexity of Go the wiki article, Go and mathematics [wikipedia.org] is actually quite good). No, Go will not be beaten in the same way that Chess was no matter how powerful computers get. If we want to crack Go then we will need some new advancements in AI (which would probably be useful in their own right even if you don't care about Go) and game playing methods that go beyond game trees and search.