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Man Vs Machine In Chess - Who Is Winning? 534

Posted by simoniker from the autobot-or-decepticon? dept.
FFriedel writes "In a few weeks, the world's strongest player Garry Kasparov will take on X3D Fritz in a high-profile man-machine chess match. Who is the statistical favourite? Since computers have been steadily improving and are now holding their own against the very strongest human players, one would think it may be Fritz. Not necessarily, says statistician Jeff Sonas, who doesn't believe computers will inevitably surpass the top humans, and presents empirical evidence to support his claim as part of a series of articles for ChessBase."
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Man Vs Machine In Chess - Who Is Winning? More

Man Vs Machine In Chess - Who Is Winning?

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  • required reading (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbellis ( 142590 ) * <jonathanNO@SPAMcarnageblender.com> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:35PM (#7168447) Homepage
    If you think you know something about computer chess but haven't read Behind Deep Blue [amazon.com] by the man largely responsible for creating it, you need to correct your error asap. Did you know, for instance, that in 1997 Deep Blue had 480 chips running its chess program _in silicon_ with 30 rs/6000 nodes controlling them? Moore's law isn't going to let a 2 (4?) cpu PC catch up THAT fast, let alone when it's pure software.

    BTW, the Fritz people make a big deal about beating deep blue in 1995. That would have been a big deal, but the program they beat was Deep Thought II ("Deep Blue Prototype"), not deep blue, a weaker program running on weaker hardware. The match was in Hong Kong where DT2 had persistent problems with their data line to the USA where DT2 was physically located.

    • Re:required reading (Score:4, Interesting)

      by God! Awful 2 ( 631283 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:09PM (#7168673) Journal

      BTW, the Fritz people make a big deal about beating deep blue in 1995. That would have been a big deal, but the program they beat was Deep Thought II ("Deep Blue Prototype"), not deep blue, a weaker program running on weaker hardware. The match was in Hong Kong where DT2 had persistent problems with their data line to the USA where DT2 was physically located.
      What's the big deal about the data line? Isn't the computer choosing the moves? If that's the case you can just have someone tell you the moves it chooses over the phone!

      Anyway, I think this article is dumb. The guy raises the possibility that computers will never be better at chess than humans. That should set off immediate alarm bells that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

      Then he states that if it does happen, it won't happen in the near future. That, in itself, would be a defensible position (if the guy hadn't already proved that he doesn't know what he's talking about). But he doesn't back up this assertion with any compelling logic. If, as has often been speculated, chess is turning into a giant game of memorization, it stands to reason that computers are going to gain the upper hand.

      -a
      • The guy raises the possibility that computers will never be better at chess than humans. That should set off immediate alarm bells that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

        Why? Is it not conceivable that computers may perhaps be weaker in some THING than humans?

        But he doesn't back up this assertion with any compelling logic.

        I think you need to wait for part III lol no joke :) The first part had absolutely nothing. It seemed like an intro...he claims to support his position with empir
  • Anyone else think that once machines take over the Earth, all they will do is play chess against eachother?

  • Moxy Fruvous on Chess Computers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kevinatilusa ( 620125 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:42PM (#7168480)
    Moxy Fruvous did an amusing take on the topic a few years ago at MIT on their U.S. tour. The discussion made it on their "Live Noise" album as "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue", and a transcript is available at http://www.fruvous.com/ln-lyr.html about 2/3 of the way down the page. (Warning, there are a few instances of adult language in the discussion)
  • As long as its not another round of computer aided chess vs man... as I recall the last few times a 'computer' beat this guy, they had a team of programmers modifying the engine as the game was in progress.

    Its not cheating; its computer *aided* chess.
    Ahem.

  • still (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:42PM (#7168485)
    I consider it's still humans competing with other humans playing chess. On one hand we have a chess-master using all the power of his brain, on the other some computer people using a high-powered computer.
    When a computer can learn to play chess by itself and then beat the top players, then we have something to look at.
    • What exactly is meant by "by itself"? Computers were invented by humans and are programmed by humans, and as such you can always see everything a computer does as (indirectly, anyway) the product of a human mind. Are you saying that you won't be interested in computer chess until such time as a computer springs into existence without human intervention and then somehow learns on its own how to play chess?

      I don't think we're ever going to see that happen, but if you're just interested in computers automat

    • Someone makes this argument every time slashdot posts an article about chess. That it's really a contest between a programmer and a chess player.

      Quite frankly, this is bullshit. Or at least the programmer has a massive advantage. It's like saying that a race between an olympic runner and a car is really a test of skill between the runner and the driver. Well, it isn't. I doesn't take nearly as much skill and dedication to drive a car as it does to run a mile in four minutes. Writing a chess program isn't

  • poor humans! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by seringen ( 670743 )
    chess is a finite problem, and although it's a very large finite problem, it's one that some day can be solved. I don't know why people care all that much about computers being able to beat humans, maybe they will just have to start playing each other. I'm only going to be worried when computers start writing more interesting stories than the top writers

  • Kasparov is a bad choice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:46PM (#7168514) Journal

    Part of the problem is that Kasparov is this generation's GM. Kasparov plays very emotional games. He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win.

    This is a great strategy against people, but it's not so effective against computers. Kasparov is probably the worst chess master to pit against a machine since Ruy Lopez (I think he's won with the Ruy Lopez opening a few times, case in point: it's a brutal and humiliating play for the losing opponent).

    Kasparov knows that the computer can "think through" future moves better than he can. Computers, in fact, do the opposite of human chess players: we set goals and try to find ways to get there while computers search through various ways to find a satisfactory goal they can achieve. So, Kasparov plays it very conservative and keeps himself out of any situations that give the computer too much range of foresight, which is why the Kasparov/computer matches tend to look like Verdun (though he's been surprised a few times).

    Personally I'd like to see some of the younger generation take on the big programs. They tend to play more technically and less passionately than Kasparov and his generation.

    • You know, when I hear you say (re Kaparov):...."He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win."...then I realise that we inhabit utterly different worlds. I could certainly be destroyed, smashed and humiliated if a drunken Hell's Angel knocked me out with a pool cue and strung me up from a streetlight by my underpants, but just because some other guy moved a few wooden pieces to better places than I did ? N

      • Oddly enough, I've had my ass kicked by a Hell's Angel in Oceanside, CA (I figured since I was a Marine the other Marines in the bar would leap to my aid... ah, to be young and naive again).

        It was painful, but not terribly embarassing (though explaining to the MP's as I crawled back onto Camp Pendleton the next morning why I had 2 black eyes and shredded clothing was a little humiliating; I said I picked up a stripper and her pimp rolled me, it seemed less pathetic).

        I personally am not humiliated when I g

      • Chess is boxing with the mind. Also, if you make no mistakes, it's a draw. As if that ever happens...

        If you lose, you truly have no-one to blame but yourself. No excuses. There is no random factor, you have full information, the game is initially equal. Losing without a chance after a lifetime of study hurts.

    • . Kasparov plays very emotional games

      I'm not sure what an 'emotional' chess move looks like. I can say this, kasparov's ELO has been over 2800 for quite some time (the highest rating in history). Younger players like rajdbov et all do not play more 'technically' than kasparov. He is the single greatest chess tactician ever, period (and an unmitigated jerk, meh) tactical brilliance. [demon.co.uk]

      The really interesting thing is that a GM combined with a computer is MUCH stronger than a GM or computer by themselves. I

  • does the computer do a dance? (Score:5, Funny)

    by blah1019 ( 695326 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:46PM (#7168515) Homepage
    Like when a player scores a touchdown? Or do the programmers wheel it around in circle chanting it's name? You gotta let them have a little fun. Better then making them mad and having them go Terminator on us.
    • I think it was Kasporov who claimed--and this appears to be a very Kasporovian thing to do, from what I've heard--that the IBM technicians administering Deep Blue cheated by having speakers attached to the machine (why would it have speakers, anyway?) play speech-synthesized clips from Shakespear to insult him, distracting him during his turns.

      I honestly can't remember where I read this, and whether it was parody or real. But the thought is pretty funny.

  • Go (slightly OT) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:48PM (#7168522) Homepage

    Not to get too off-topic, but there are also now several (increasing) prizes for beating top ranked players (well, rather, any professional player and occasionally there's a prize for beating a dan ranked amateur) in Go.

    For those of you who are unfamiliar, there is an excellent, if somewhat dated, article [nyu.edu] that discusses some of the difficulties for getting a computer to play Go well. It also talks about Janice Kim, a 1 dan (professional) at the time (now a 3 dan), beating the then-best program when the computer had a 25 stone handicap. To give an idea, a 9 stone handicap in an experimental games between evenly matched professionals generates about 140 point advantage.

    As I said, it is a bit dated (5 years old) and computers have improved, but we are still nowhere close to beating a professional.

    • Not OT at all, IMO. Compare how easy it is to beat whatever version of Go comes with your Linux distro with how hard it is to beat a COTS chess program on "hard" setting.

      Chess relies to a large extent on intuition and imagination, but Go relies almost solely on it. I think it might have something to do with the more strict rules of chess. Show a grandmaster a chess board that was achieved by legal moves and (s)he can usually memorize it; show him/her a "random" board and (s)he cannot. Go is not so simple;

  • Infinite Chess (Score:3, Interesting)

    by c0dedude ( 587568 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:48PM (#7168527)
    I was wondering a while ago if chess could be set out into a possibility tree with work such as seti@home where one players actions will always be counterable. Theoretically it's possible, but i haven't done the preliminary calcs to determine processing power necessary/time/etc. Your thoughts?
  • I think human play will improve as machines improve until humans can't keep up with the machine anymore. It's hard to say when that happens because chess is an exponential problem. 10-20 years, I think.

  • What about Go? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Computers are only good at chess for two reasons:

    1) They can brute force the game. On the 8x8 board there is a very limited number of permissible moves at any given moment, and an even lower number of desirable ones.

    2) They can easily tell if a move benefits them. Chess is a game where its very easy to look at the board and say who's winning. Board position, captured pieces, influence are all key points that anyone can spot at a glance.

    In my eyes, this just isn't a challenge, but straightforward appli

  • naivity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @09:56PM (#7168581) Homepage
    It is simply naive to say computers will never be able to outdo human thought, such as that required for chess or other logic/pattern-recognition based tasks. This is analogous to 19th century Royal Society scientists claiming one could never escape the Earth's gravity into space and beyond (and providing "proof," mind you). But I digress. Chess is not so much about logic and thought (in the normal sense) as it is for pattern recognition and "looking ahead." The best chess players in the world have nearly memorized all the possible combinations in all the possible scenarios, contrary to popular belief that their abilities are innate. I don't know if software has evolved enough to beat him this time around, but if the second math was any indication, my money's on the machine.
    • computers have already surpassed humans. The matches that are being played these days are not against against the strongest computers. If you pit the strongest computer(the japanese supercomputer) against the strongest human(kasparov), the human has near zero chance of drawing , forget winning.
      • You're wrong.

        None of the modern computers even considers brute-forcing the move tree - it's impossible. The search space is far too big, and considering some moves/board configurations can loop back on themselves, it's nearly infinite. Brute-forcing the move tree is simply useless.

        That being said, all the major chess programs nowadays are not limited by hardware, but by software. Throw better hardware at them, and they will not play better chess.
        • No, I am not wrong. Look at the game where the human lost. It's all about probability, risk, and previous plays. Taking all those into consideration and making a partial tree of the "foreseeable future" will almost guarantee the computer a victory.
    • Sometimes it's not just naivity that makes a person think we'll forever be at the top of the intellectual food chain -- sometimes it's just plain old fear (conscious or not).

      Once a person has been introduced to the inevitability of the evolution of smarter-than-human intelligence [kurzweilai.net], they can no longer claim ignorance, and either accept it [singinst.org] or go into denial like most people because the future shock [everything2.com] is too much for old belief systems to handle, or too fantastic for bitter cynics who didn't get their promised

  • Human advantage (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rpj1288 ( 698823 )
    One thing that will keep people on top for a while is our inconsistancies. A computer works on logic, and can usually be predicted to do something. People, on the other hand, are spontanious, and use a different kind of logic. We also take risks that do not make sense. But if something is crazy enough, it could trick a computers. Because computers do not lie. They cannot lay traps and they cannot bluff.
    • You can't win at chess by making moves that don't make sense. The computer would play ahead and find out what you're up to and make appropriate moves then. That is more likely to confuse the human.
    • Computers don't need to lie, or bluff. This isn't a game of chance. It's a deterministic game, that involves no chance. If you make a foolish move, you won't confuse the computer. The computer will make the best counter it can find, and proceed to crush you.

      Intimidation, and bluffing work against other humans, but it'd never work against a computer. That's like saying you'll trick an omnicient being by doing something they won't expect you to. If they are omnicient, they KNOW what you are doing. Co

  • What happens when an AI figures out the optimal strategy is to simply kill its opponent, thus guaranteeing a "win"? Let's be careful how you specify those goal conditions, guys!

  • a contradiction? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by X_Bones ( 93097 ) <<moc.oohay> <ta> <31zronad>> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:01PM (#7168612) Homepage Journal
    from the article:

    "The red line is Garry Kasparov's rating over time, and the blue line is the rating of the top computers on the SSDF list. The blue line is creeping closer and closer to the red line. It seems just on the verge of crossing over. "

    But then, further, down, he writes:

    "Although computers obviously must be improving in recent years, the strongest humans seem to also be improving at about the same rate."

    These two statements contradict each other, don't they? Either computers are improving faster than grand-masters, meaning the graph and its extraploations are true; or, computers and grand-masters are improving at the same rate, which would mean the percentage of human wins and draws would be generally the same as in previous years (something not indicated by the second graphic in the article)?

    • Re:a contradiction? (Score:3, Informative)

      by rakeswell ( 538134 )
      No, it's not necessarily a contradiction. Simplest example: Players A and B have the same rating and win, lose and draw an equal number of games. Let's also say that both of their games (technique) is improving at an equal rate. Therefore, their ratings do not change, even though their play has improved. That's the tough thing about chess. You can play a very deep game and still lose. You don't get credit for having played well -- it all comes down to mate or a draw.

    • Re:a contradiction? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by void* ( 20133 )
      The bigger problem is that the computers aregetting their rankings solely by playing other computers (if I'm reading the article right). The ratings are dependant on who's in the pool of players.

      Say the best computer in the set of computers always beats or draws the other computers. lets say it wins more than it draws. In that pool of players, it's rating will tend to creep up.

      So the ratings aren't necessarily comparable. Take a 1700 player, throw him in a pool of only 1000 players - when his rating break

  • How complicated is Chess? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:09PM (#7168670) Journal
    According to p. 45 of Russel & Norvig's AI book, a look up table for the game of chess (i.e. if you mapped every achievable permutation of chess pieces on a board) you would have 10^150 entries. Unfortunately, there are only 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. Even with excellent heuristics, I think these numbers show that a computer that capable of playing perfect chess will not be built in the foreseeable future.
    • Those are very conservative numbers. Even the most naive of heuristics elminate a huge fraction of those possible "states". Another huge fraction are simply not realizable given the constraints on how peices are allowed to move.

      A naive calculation of the state space size has little to do with computational difficulty.

      • .... but yes I agree that a machine capable of playing "perfect" chess is a long way off!

        Sorry, I thought you were arguing in favor of the author's unfounded claims that humans are unlikely to be beaten consistently by machines any time soon...

  • What about playing chess with God? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dark-br ( 473115 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:10PM (#7168678) Homepage
    This guy [std.com] has a very interesting write up about chess and probability. Worth a read.

    • Yawn. (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      Uh. Not worth a read, a waste of time. Summary: author says God cannot be omnipotent and infallible if humans have free will- coz if God knows what we will do, we don't have free will, and since we have free will (author doesn't prove that convincingly either) God is fallible etc etc. The author also follows with some insulting remarks too.

      Philosophers and other people have done arguments like that or better, far more efficiently and elegantly - e.g. "can God create a rock he cannot lift" and so on. Some h
  • the mathes that are being played by humans against computers these days (expcept for kasparov vs DeepBlue) are all mostly on single processor PCs. But, single processor PCs are not the only computers in this world. It is only on these machines that humans are able to draw against computers, not win. The standard method being used by GMs to draw is to set up a closed position which need deep strategical moves and long term plans to win againt. Since the games are limited to 40 moves in 2 hrs per player, the
  • "The only way to win, is not to play."

    How about a nice game of gobal thermonuclear war?

  • I can't even beat an Apple II at chess. DAMN YOU CHESSMASTER 2000!!
  • (Admitting I didnt read the Chess Base pages)

    Look at the game TicTacToe. There are some finite amount of moves (something like 9!). Therefore it takes very little space to store the entire game tree, consisting of every possible move, in a computer. This means that a computer will always win a game, because it knows the best path at any given move. (TicTacToe might be wierd in the fact it seems that two good players can always tie)

    Then look at Checkers. Sure, its much more complex then TTT. However,

    • You're absolutely wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:34PM (#7168840)
      While the total number of states in Tic Tac Toe is a boringly small finite number, the total number of states in chess is rather amusingly large. And by "amusingly large", I should point out that I'm a large number theorist.

      How large is "amusingly large"? Around 10^150, if I remember my AI class correctly. Discarding entirely the problem of how you'd create a game tree of that size (given the cosmos has about 10^77 particles), let's just address the energy required to compute the table.

      It requires an absolute minimum of kT*ln2, or about 3*10^-26 Joules, of energy to set a bit. Each cell on a chess board requires a minimum of four bits to store its state (it has to store a three-bit enum { PAWN, ROOK, KNIGHT, BISHOP, QUEEN, KING } and a one-bit enum { BLACK, WHITE }). So for a 64-block chess grid, you're looking at 256 bits just to store state.

      256 * 3*10^-26 = 7.7*10^-24

      7.7 * 10^-24 * 10^150 = 7.7 * 10^126

      Do you have any freaking clue how much energy 10^126 Joules is? It's frickin' huge. Like enough to cause a symmetry-breaking event which would propagate through the universe at the speed of light and utterly annihilate everything in its path, including the computer churning out the complete decision tree for chess.

      I can see it now. When Judgment Day comes, it's all going to be because of a Slashdotter who thinks he knows a lot more about what computers can and can't do than he really does, and goes off to solve unsolvable problems without considering the thermodynamic consequences of his actions.

      Typical for Slashdot.
      • Well, you could store each chessboard as the positions of each of the 32 pieces - that's 3 bits for X and 3 bits for Y position, plus another bit to state whether the piece is in play or not. 32 times 7 bits = 224 bits rather than 256.

        Not that it will make a great any difference to the outcome, although if someone did try they would be pleased to know that they had saved about 1x10^126 Joules, which should reduce their electricity bill somewhat.

        Jolyon
      • I've seen the argument about "more than the number of particles in the universe" stuff before. All over the place. The last time was doing research about WWII cryptography, and how one scheme or another (I believe it was the 4 wheel Enigma) had more possibilities than particles in the universe. And, somehow, we managed to crack it.

        The first mistake is in assuming that you have to store board state in its entierty. We've invented this thing called 'compression.' It's really handy for taking situations whic

      • Neurodynamic programming: tree size not crucial (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tessaiga ( 697968 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @11:12PM (#7169054)
        Just to nitpick a little (since you're a math person, I thought you'd appreciate having your terms right): there are 10^120 different possible sequences of moves. The number of different states is actually quite a bit smaller, only around 10^35 or so. (A rough approximation would be 64!/32!, or the number of different ways you can set up a chessboard.) As a side note, this figure originates from a paper by Claude Shannon [bell-labs.com], the so-called father of modern communications ("Programming a digital computer for playing chess", Phil. Mag., pp 356-375, 1950). All computer chess programs today are based on the fundamental principles from this paper.

        However, noting that the state-space size is large isn't really a very useful observation, since chess programs these days don't try to map out the entire tree of possible outcomes. Instead, they operate on neurodynamic programming techniques, which basically try to extract which "features" of the game are important and weigh those features to decide which moves to make. This significantly reduces the complexity of the system, but requires that the person writing the program have some intuition about which "features" are important. In chess, for example, these include such things as material balance, piece mobility, king safety, and other positional factors. A period of training is usually required as well, where basically the computer goes over a lot of games that grandmasters have played and tries to "learn" how to weigh the different features in order to choose the optimal move.

        For those who are interested in reading further about this (yeah, yeah, this is Slashdot, if people can't RTFA what are the odds they'll want to pick up a book? :) ) a good place to start would be Chapter 6 of Bertsekas' "Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control [athenasc.com]".

  • ... being met here?

    a) Top human vs Top computer: computers defending champs;

    b) Elegance of tactics: humans (computers still brute force);

    c) Efficiency (wins/joules): humans for forseeable future; and

    d) Number of Wins: Average Human vs Average Computer: computers rule (sorry but people who beat computers of any level are seriously in the minority).

    Pessimistically, humans take the occasional battle but the war has been lost.
  • ...but if you think Chess is complex, you guys should try playing Go (wei`chi, igo, baduk... many names).

    Basically, there's a million dollar prize out of someone can make a go playing computer program that can beat a weak professional. How are they doing? Well... if you've played Go for a couple months you can probably beat the strongest program to date. (And yes, I can)

    What's go like? Try:
    http://www.usgo.org (many links there)
    http://www.kiseido.com
    http://www.goprobl ems.com

  • Sonas argument is silly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phr1 ( 211689 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @10:27PM (#7168788)
    He says Deep Blue II hasn't been improved on since 1997 and therefore computers have maxed out. That's dumb. Deep Blue II hasn't been improved on because nobody has spent the bucks since then to improve on it. It's simply stronger than its successors, which is not surprising since DB2 used massive amounts of custom VLSI hardware built by PhD researchers with megabucks of IBM Research funding, while everything since then has been programs running on ordinary PC's programmed by small companies and hobbyists. PC's keep advancing but it will be a while before they catch up with what DB2's massive parallelism could do. It's also possible that chess hardware (maybe using FPGA's) will make a comeback.

    Meanwhile, the fastest airplane ever built is still the SR-71A made in the 1960's. That doesn't mean aircraft technology has come to a standstill. It just means outrunning the SR-71A hasn't been a priority of aircraft builders since then. If they wanted to expend the resources to make a faster plane today, they could do it.

    Deep Blue II was the SR-71A of chess computers. What's come afterwards has been a lot more economical and practical, but hasn't tried to match it in pure performance, and hasn't done so.

  • Of course humans will eventually be beat by computers. They have Moore's Law and we don't. End of story.

    simon
  • Look, you can slap together all the specialized hardware you want, and yes, a room full of top of the line silicon will probably be able to beat a human at any specialized task, especailly one with discrete soloutions.

    Ill be impressed when they have a computer that can beat me at chess, write a sonnet, cook up lunch, play fetch with a dog, ponder a sunset, drive a car, change a diaper, laugh at groucho marx, and wonder if it has a soul. Anything less is nothing but an overgrown calculatior. A nifty godd
    • The whole point is the evolution of computers. When you take into account how fast computers (processing, software, etc.) are progressing in specialized tasks, it doesn't take an Einstein to see the implications a century or so from today, where they may very well combine all their specialized tasks and kick our inefficient asses. Think about the bigger picture.
  • Chess players tend to think that they will always have an edge on machines, because they like to think that chess is more than just some mathematical system. Often times, they associate chess skill with intelligent thought. If a computer can beat them, then there's nothing magical about the game that makes it a judge of "intelligence." Furthermore, you can hardly say that computers will never beat humans at chess because they havn't been 100% sucessful in doing so thus far. A couple of generations of archit
  • Man wins.

    The man who makes the tool that beats the guy without the tool wins.

    Guy with gun beats guy with sword, guy with sword beats man with fist. Man with fist beats armless dude.

    Simple enough for you?

    This isn't a question of man vs. machine. This is man vs. man.

    The "machines" are created by man as a collection of chess knowledge and principle. Essentially they're chess by committee, a very fast, giant, and efficient committee, but a committee nonetheless. Flaws in their understanding of the game wi
  • I'll only be impressed if they add in a real trash-talk routine. I want to computer to tell one of these guys something like "your game is weak", or "nice move- does your husband play chess too?"

    • Re:Real AI (Score:3, Funny)

      by phr1 ( 211689 )
      There was a program called "Chesster" which kibitzed like that. Much more amusingly, back in the 80's, the builders of the Belle chess computer interfaced an industrial robot to it to let the computer move actual pieces on a real chessboard. The robot was something they had around the lab for some other project, and it had very powerful motors (it was designed for automobile assembly or something like that). They had to carefully program the robot to pick up the chess pieces gently and put them down with
  • I had this discussion with a friend of mine once, is chess just a larger more complex type of tic-tac-toe?

    I mean, it is possible to end in a stalemate after all. Is it at least concievable that the only way to assure not losing is to simply create a cats game?

    would this explain the large amounts of draws we are seeing here? Is it an eventuality that someday computer vs computer and computer vs man games will all end in stalemates?

  • Comments from a Competitve Chess Player (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitaltraveller ( 167469 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @11:01PM (#7168977) Homepage
    Something the article doesn't touch on is that although chess grandmasters were caught off guard by the strength of chess computer's in the mid-90's, since then we have learned a tremendous amount about the computer's weak spots. The computer for example is very poor at playing in tight positions like some lines in the Caro-Kann and French defenses. Also many of the so-called hypermodern openings.

    I imagine the new breed of young GM's like Ponmariov, Grischuk and Malakhov probably find the prospect of beating stock Fritz/Junior/Hiarcs rather boring. A few extra CPU's isn't going to make a big difference in terms of playing power. Much more effective is to spend time tuning the engine's opening book and that takes traditional GM's with novelties.

    Kasparov should win this easily, though he did miss a trivial 2 move combination in a tournament recently so you never know...
  • Just as in normal chess, we have to break down the computer game into three parts, and then subparts

    Begin with the end, the endgame. The end of the endgame rather. This (the end of the endgame) the computer does play perfectly. It's skill keeps improving as the tables come out - three pieces left on the board, four pieces left on the board, five pieces, six pieces...and I see this continuing. So the computer is increasingly perfect in this respect.

    Opening - the computer can't innovate yet (although

  • "No true human world champions" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MacGabhain ( 198888 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @11:09PM (#7169031)
    This is the constant claim of the meaning of computers outpacing humans at chess, and it's complete BS.
    Machines have been outpacing humans in various endeavours for years. Eventually computers will be powerful enough and well programmed enough that they'll never lose (although they certainly will still draw).
    Big deal. Either show me the sprinter who can beat a formula 1 or show me the movement to claim there are no longer human champions in speed. I don't see either of those, so I don't see why it should matter for a mental game.
    I see no reason why we should care if computers can someday see all possible positions 35 moves out. Chess isn't about that. Chess is a game of reason, of insight, of spacial perception, of memory, of stamina (you try concentrating on one thing for 6 hours), and of emotion. Seeing forcing variations a dozen moves out is rarely part of the game for humans, and plenty of players have risen to the top of the game almost never calculating beyond 2 or 3 moves out. Giving a machine an 800HP engine and wheels takes absolutely nothing away from the human accomplishment of mastering the game.
    • There's a good reason why people like to think we'll remain smarter than computers: it's the last thing machines haven't beaten us at.

      Machines can fly, move faster, lift more, work faster, and are even quite good in the sack.

      The only thing left in which we humans can claim superiority is "smarts". So naturally people are going to have a strong emotional reaction when challenged in this last domain. Hell it happens every time we're challenged by machines, but this last domain is going to be the worst.

      P

  • Discussion board + Deep Blue vs today's micros (Score:5, Interesting)

    by migstradamus ( 472166 ) * on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @11:10PM (#7169039) Homepage

    There has been a chess message board discussion [chessninja.com] where the author of the article mooted his ideas last week. I write for ChessBase and worked on both of the last big man-machine matches (Kramnik-Fritz 2002 and Kasparov-Junior 2003).

    For those here who claiming obvious Deep Blue superiority over current micros because of how many chips it had and how many positions per second it looked at, some chess knowledge would help. Deep Blue only played six games and all have been analyzed to death. We know two things. One is that Deep Blue beat Kasparov and that's the only thing most people care about, the result. The other is that Deep Blue's play was far from perfect.

    Years of human and computer analysis can about as close as you can to the truth in chess. With that knowledge we can compare Deep Blue's moves to those of the current top programs such as Fritz and Junior. And we have, extensively. The bottom line is that they play better in many places, the same in others, and worse only in very few. The overall level of play by the micros in the same positions from the Deep Blue games is better. With Deep Blue in pieces that is the only way to compare the quality of their chess. Positions per second is interesting and not irrelevant, but time marches on and knowledge is important too.

    While the humans in these matches obviously have some interest in saying that the program they are playing is the strongest, hundreds of other analysts don't. And Kasparov and Kramnik aren't going to make fools of themselves by recommending moves that could be easily shown to be inferior.

    Kasparov played some of the most inconsistent and nervous chess of his life in the pressure-cooker match against Deep Blue in 1997. He resigned in a drawn position for the only time in his career and Deep Blue's other win, in the final game, came in a total mental collapse by Kasparov and was the shortest loss of his career in a serious game. All credit to the Deep Blue team, mission accomplished and all that, but it wasn't the greatest chess.

    Meanwhile, humans studied and learned. Kasparov's attempts to baffle Deep Blue by playing intentionally inferior moves was ill-advised. That era was over, he just didn't know it. But computers still have their weaknesses, as Kramnik showed in the first half of the Bahrain match.

    The top programs today running on the fastest micro hardware available play better chess than Deep Blue '97. But the top humans play better, and smarter, against them than Kasparov did in 97.

  • Wasn't this pretty much settled when Kasparov got his ass kicked by Deep Blue in '96, then again in '97?
    • Nah. Kasparov didn't get his ass kicked in '96, he WON that match, 3.5-2.5. He lost the '97 match by the same score. However, the '97 loss wasn't all that convincing. He certainly would have won a longer match, or a rematch against the same hardware and software. On the other hand, if a rematch had happened, it would not have been against an identical Deep Blue 2. The designers would have kept making improvements and speedups and gotten an even stronger machine, that might well have been convincingly

  • World's Strongest player?!? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Doomdark ( 136619 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @11:35PM (#7169169) Homepage Journal
    In a few weeks, the world's strongest player Garry Kasparov...

    Jeez. And I thought only skinny nerds played chess... but this Kasparov dude is not only ace chess player, but very strong too? What's he doing with the 'puter then? Smashing it to pieces with a well-placed sucker punch? I'd like to see him duke it out with Arnold!

  • Humans are still on top (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <marktNO@SPAMnerdflat.com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @12:03AM (#7169289) Journal
    A computer, before making a single move, is forced to evaluate literally millions of possible board configurations in order to determine which move gives it the statistically strongest position.

    A human player may, in the same amount of time, only actually evaluate a few dozen board possibilities before making a single move, The human player can somehow eliminate even *considering* 99.9% of the possibilities, and even then the human often doesn't fair too badly, especially considering the odds against him.

    Until computers can pull off this sort of "magic"*, no computer can ever be considered a match for a human player. It's no more astounding that a computer can occasionally (or even usually) beat a human at chess by considering more moves than a human player does than it is astounding that a pocket calculate can show you the value of pi to 8 decimal places with a single keystroke. That's not intelligence, just raw computation. Put another way, it's no more suprising than the fact that a heavyweight wrestler of lesser skill would have a good chance at being able to take down a more skilled featherweight.

    * Clarke's law says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (and the corallory which says that magic is always indistinguishable from some sufficiently advanced technology).

    • That's not intelligence, just raw computation.

      What's the difference? Why is the ability to store large amounts of state in mind and do various forms of complex pattern matching intelligence, whereas the ability to look at many positions and calculate their value not?

  • Computers won't surpass humans (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:26AM (#7170470) Homepage

    And neither will they ever need more than 640K of RAM.

    The problem with using empirical evidence is that it's dealing with then. This is now. In the future we will have quantum computers with enough storage space to calculate (or just lookup) a winning path from any possible position.

    Computers will inevitably surpass meat brains. The real question is: when, and what sort of computer?

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