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Games Entertainment

Gary Kasparov vs. The World 159

Posted by justin++ from the chess-anyone? dept.
Shaheen writes "Gary Kasparov (world's greatest chess player) is once again doing something to mix technology with Chess. This time it's him against anyone and everyone. Basically, Kasparov makes a move, then the world - along with "expert" advice - votes which move to make. You can sign up here. " Interesting, but could chess be where some of Brooks's theories apply? Could throwing more people at the problem hurt instead of being beneficial?
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Gary Kasparov vs. The World More

Gary Kasparov vs. The World

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  • Computing Power (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All someone needs to do is write a Seti@home like processor to play chess, and unleash the full power of the internet against Mr. Kasparov.

    That'll show him. :)

  • Re:distributed game tree anyone? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Building on your idea, I think a distributed chess computer would be very feasible and very fast.

    It's simple: each computer would be assigned a different "prediction" of the moves that Kasparov and the computer are going to make. Then it would tell the server its conclusions about which move should be taken, assuming the predicted moves really are made.

    The question is this: is there enough computing power in the world that every game could somehow be played out? One major problem is storage of the results of each game, but what if we had not only distributed clients but also distributed servers?

    If there were some way to play out every game, it would indeed be possible to create the perfect chess player. Then we could discover whether there is a true advantage in being white or black.

  • Re:not so fast (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So perhaps some unexpected moves by the non-experts will put them in positions they are unused to but that they can then actually leverage to beat Kasparov.

    Chess is not about playing "unexpected moves". Chess is about "outplaying" his opponent, by playing good, (or good enough moves). It is mainly not about creativity, but about deep and right analysis. Good players are sometimes creative, in that they play unexpected good moves, but that just comes from their analysis (either "innate" do to their experience, or due to calculation).

    In fact, any good player, and Kasparov in particular, definitly "expect" all the good moves to happens. If you are playing and play unexpected moves, then either you have out-analysed Kasparov (not possible if you are a non-expert) or you are just playing a bad move.

  • Re:Good point, bad example (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The most popular is always the inferior one in your opinion. All the same objections as above can be applied to an elected body as well. They are just a "population" in a "perfect democracy" themselves, the only difference being that their decisions also impact lots of other people too.

    I'd suggest you read "After the revolution?" by Robert A. Dahl, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale. It gives one of the best arguments I've seen about this issue.

    In fact the problems mentioned above is in most countries today worse than they had been with a "perfect" democracy, since the election processes in most "democratic" countries favor the largest parties in such a way that they gain an even stronger positition than their support in the people (there are exceptions, but they are few).

    You may argue that a politicians interests would be somehow "better" than a normal citizen. But I'd argue to the contrary: An elected official is "tainted" by being in a situation with above average payment, which make him unlikely to be sympathetic to the issues of the common man.

    In addition, contrary to the people at large voting directly, the elected official would have to worry about his voters (at least during election time). He would be even more inclined to take the side of the majority, and ignore the minority, than what any single voter would be. A single voter has only his own interests to consider. The elected official has his own interests and/ the interests of the majority of the voters in his district to consider.

    This means that minorities are a lot less likely to have any/b> support in an elected body, than they have in among the voters.

    Which again mean that the chance of the elected body considering their case and supporting their rights are even smaller.

    The elected bodies accountability to their voters actually reward ignoring minorities (we're not talking race or social position here, but people with minority opinions, allthough the two will often be the same). You might hope that different geographic concentrations might improve things. And in some way it might.

    But all in all, indirect "democracy" only ensure that the majority have an even tighter control over the legislative.

    Not that I don't advocate a perfect democracy everywhere. In the legal system, for instance, it would be inherently wrong, since the legal system isn't supposed to support the any faction, but is supposed to uphold what is really an "agreement".

    Also, a direct "democracy" without any checks and balances would also be a problem, since it is open to momentary fluctuations in opinion to a great extent, and since it will mean the majority will always "win".

    But worse than an elected body, elected with a process that strengthen the majority's hold? I don't think so.

  • MEEPT!!! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    MEEPT! finds this interesting, and suggests it should be run much like the open source community.

    ----------

    "RMS, what do you suggest as the next move?" - ESR

    "Chess sucks!" - dapslash loyalists

    "It's NOT a move! It's a GNU/move. 'Move' is the actual act of changing location of a gnu/chess piece; whereas 'move' in the sense that you use it is the act of GNU/thought followed by a 'move'" - RMS

    "Chess is great!" - slashcolon readers

    "This sucks ass, we should make the board 3 yards wide and paint it green and purple" - Raster

    "Chess sucks!" - slashdap extremists

    "Chess? Did I try that and quit yet? *checks book-of-quit-things* Yup." - Bruce Perens

    "I'm sure Redhat is behind this!" - dotdapslashists

    "Can I buy a 10% stake in 'chess'?" - Bill Gates

    "It's a Microsoft coverup!" - dotdilleslashdipdorks

    "Well, I don't really understand chess..." - Linus

    "1 C4|/| H4>0R Y0u!" - r00tshell script kiddies

    "*bow*godhasspokengodhasspoken*bow*" - the masses

    "'Chess' has been updated. Please download, recompile, reboot, and start again from the beginning." - Alan Cox

    "FIRST POST!" - doddleslashers

    "Um... where'd you freaks come from?" - Gary Kasparov

    ----------

    MEEPT! would like to purchase movie rights to the above saga, and cast Larry, Curly, Moe, and Drew Barrymore in the lead roles.

    MEEPT!!!!!!!!!!

  • FICS (Score:1)

    by drendite ( 3 )
    This seems like a great time to plug FICS [freechess.org]. (Free Internet Chess server). I have played "team games" there, which is somewhat similar, but on a much much smaller scale. I'm talking about games like 3 on 3 here. It was nice because we had some others to bounce of ideas.. Then again, we had a focused discussion. Not something the "world" can do very easily.
  • Yay, MEEPT!! is back!

    ...and there was much rejoicing.

    BTW, what evil being took away the Glorious MEEPT!!'s /. account, relegating him to Anonymous Coward status?
  • I noticed that this 'competition' is run on the MSN gaming zone, and is for Windows users only. This will eliminate just about everyone with an intelligence and chess ability that that could possibly approach Kasparov's own. This will obviously will tilt the game heavily towards Kasparov's favour, not that he needs to much help anyway.
  • Posted by Shady P:

    This reminds of something an old, really old, retired IBM Software Engineer once told me. He said that IBM used to have this theory that if you put 100 programmers on a project it would be done 10 times faster than only having 10 programmers on the same project. How funny. With the same theory applied, the world should be 6 billion times better than Kasparov, assuming everyone in the world knows how to play chess and actually participates.
  • Posted by PasswdIs ScoreOne:

    Chess is a good candidate for being split up into n small tasks. It compartmentalizes well. Each client could examine a small subtree of possible moves, assigning an heuristic value to the top of their tree node. Clients pass this value up the chain until the top client just picks the move with the highest value. Everything would all be happening in parallel, and should thus make for a very strong and very fast player.

    Of course, if *one* client in the net dies examining what is really the best possible move, the entire distributed.net system will suffer. The only way out is to introduce redundandy (the same tree of moves may be processed by many people). But this chips away at the total possible maximum strength of distributed.net. But then, that's always the fundamental tradeoff isn't it?
  • Posted by ThickAsTwoShortPlanks:

    From what I remember about the subject from AI class :

    1) There's not enough copmputing power, or seconds in the universe to do an exhastive search on the tree. It's one *big* tree.

    2) Throwing computing power at the problem helps, but not much (as you get less and less dividends for your extra effort.) More significant is better stratagies in working out how to work things out (if you see what I mean.) Computing power has doubles every 18 months or so, but the ability of computers to play chess has greatly surpassed that.

    Later.

    Mark.
  • So, if the world loses against Gary Kasparov, does that mean that we are collectively more stupid than Deep Blue? :^)

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?

  • If everyone is voting on moves each day, any kind of planned strategy is out the window. I doubt he'll lose.

  • Don't know which "we" you're talking about regarding elected officials, but, if you're referring to the US Federal Gov't, the Federalist Papers disagree with you.

    Quoth James Madison: (full document at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/fed_10.html)

    Here are two of the most salient paragraphs:

    No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

    --snip some--

    From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

    To put it in more geek-friendly terms, compare the most popular of just about anythign to the best of just about anything. :-)

    The most popular is almost always the inferior one, but with the best marketing given a large enough market.

    For instance, Windows vs. (insert your religious choice here). The same can be applied to movies. Try watching the Independent Film Channel if you've got cable. They actually break the mold of the 8 different plots washed, rinsed & repeated by Hollywood.

  • Hmm.. maybe theoretically. :) Realistically, I tried like hell to get past the Go puzzle to see the last girl option in 11th hour (after 2 prior wins picking the wheelchair girl and the slutgrrl). No dice. ;)

    Btw, anyone know what happens if you pick the one you were originally supposed to rescue?
  • However, unlike this game, it *would* be interesting to see a game between one very good player, vs. a team of good players, who all have talent for cooperation.

  • Internet standards aren't created by democracy. Unlike in ISO commitees, voting is rare and informal on IETF working groups. Instead, decisions are made by consensus. And, of course, those who do the work has the largest influence.


  • Well, we've seen how well a large group of people approached the "problem" of the storage capacity of the human brain -
    (ROFLMAO)

    I know, Gary Kasparov is Russian! He's gonna kick everyone's asses and use it as propaganda to show how stupid democracy is!

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • See my post above :-) (or below..)

    If you have 3 or 4 'experts' you're guaranteed to have an average of about 3 to 4 different overall playing strategies and 6 to 8 different ideas about how to play the next move. Especially in the opening, but at other times as well. And because a style of play is so habitual and ingrained, it's really really hard to play along with someone else's ideas -- if I were watching a slow positional game I'd keep trying to point out tactical disruptions that could be made. 3 or 4 'experts' (hopefully really GMs) could maybe work, since you'd have a small enough field of ideas that you could agree on one theme consistently. Problem is, you'll probably have more than that, not to mention the lesser players who want to chip in (with plausible ideas probably)

    Daniel

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by Daniel ( 1678 )
    [bafflement]

    Daniel
  • :-)

    Has Meept been on vacation?

    Daniel

  • Won't work. (Score:4)

    by Daniel ( 1678 ) <dburrows&debian,org> on Friday June 18, 1999 @01:37PM (#1843232)
    I play chess. This will not work.

    The reason is that decisions in a chess game depend very much on one's own personal inclinations. Some people like elegant, slow games in which the object is to win by playing more thematic moves than the other player. Other people like to play lines which lead to muddled, knife-edge tactical positions in which it's unclear who will win. And of course the very best players will do both at once :-) But seriously, they'll have problems with conflicting styles of play; I doubt they'll even make it out of the opening [the beginning of the game for non-chess-players] without getting into trouble -- in fact the opening is the worst time since some people can be almost as religious about their decision of 'opening lines' (canned moves to start a game with) as computer users are about operating systems. [dunno if the best players are..] Imagine a FreeBSD user, a Linux user, and a Mac user working together to build a system from scratch, hardware and software, and you might begin to get the idea here :-)

    A second problem is that good chess play requires a decision about goals and a commitment to them. This could be good of course -- if everyone decides on a goal together they can all agree on how to pursue it. However (see point 1) this is unlikely to happen -- if half the people decide they want to launch an all-out attack while the other half want to play a more strategic game, you could end up with a situation where the World is lurching back and forth between plans. And just two opinions about what should be done is unlikely -- you're probably always going to have at least 3 and at points where there are important decisions to be made you could have as many as 10 or 20 plausible moves. (and be assured that Kasparov will force his opponents to make as many decisions as possible -- even in normal chess this is good play..more decisions means more ways to screw up..but when your opponent is already not single-minded it is an even stronger idea)

    In sum then: too many cooks will spoil the soup.

    Daniel
  • Yeah, I thought this was gonna be MY witty comment, but apparently like 29 people beat me to it ;)

    But for real, how neat would this be? How about 2 competeing teams of distributed chess clusters? MacOS Vs. Linux? Linux Vs. Linux? Windows Vs. Palm? Heh... I dunno, if I ever get the willpower maybe I'll try to put it together, but I'd really rather someone beat me to it.

  • We're all very impressed. Not only did you hear about this first, you submitted it a week ago! you also thought of the witty title but you got no credit... Theft I tell you!
  • Yes. "The Mythical Man Month"

    --

  • > The second-rated grandmaster lost to a K6-2
    > OC'ed with Kryocool. See:
    >http://www.kryotech.com/articles/chess_release. asp

    If you read the computer beat him playing blitz games. Sorry to say blitz is not chess when playing against a computer.
  • First off, the chess game will take months to play. One move a day!? Second, a consensus of chess intermediates will suck compared to a single chess expert. That's why we have elected officials instead of having a popular vote.
  • I think he has the mindset that many folks here do, unfortunately. Need someone or something to rebel against. Hehe, in the 60s kids rebelled by getting high and sharing free love. Today's kids (at least today's geek kids), spend their time dissing MS. Oh well.
  • For Kasparov that is....

    Since only windows users can play he won't have to face the Linux community.

    Ken
  • I think his head would explode.

    Ken

  • A good cracker could "Stuff the ballot" box with really crappy moves. Perhaps we could even lose in 5 moves!

    Then the whole windows community would really look like crap.

    Ken

  • That the average IQ of the Linux community is at least 50 points higher than the average IQ of the windows community.

    Creativity is very important, drone.

    Ken

  • In case nobody knew. The way to determine the IQ of a group:

    • Ascertain the average IQ of the group.
    • Divide that value by the number of people in the group.

    In other words, the larger a group, the more collectively stupid it is. Ever see a military formation marching? Very impressive for the most part, but incredibly stupid. Also explains why things designed by comittee (as opposed to mere approval) tend to be garbage (Divx anyone?).

    Basically once a group exceeds 200 people or so, a slug has greater subjective intelligence than the group in question.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

    1. Actually the design of Linux is very coherent. The experimental kernel-tree has features that the currently stable tree does not. They're hacked on until they're stable, then the new stable kernel is released. No comittee is involved.
    2. No high IQ individuals involved in Linux? How nice that you are omniscient! Thanks for letting us know we're "wasting" our time! I shudder at the amount of time and effort such a cutting remark must have cost you to develop.
    3. No. Linus decides what's in the kernel. Each project has it's own method of development. I also have an EXTREME problem with your unveiled reference to Linux users as Nazis. I'll comfort myself with the reminder that the difference between idiocy and genius is that genius has limits. Idiocy, such as yours, knows no bounds.
    4. How do YOU know the code is below average? Have you actually looked at it? And did you really understand what you were looking at? Remember, if it says "See Jane run. Run Jane, run." that it's NOT source code!
      In addition, how the heck do you know what AVERAGE code looks like? You never see any code AT ALL from Microsoft.

      Thanks for being a gutless turd and abusing the privelege of AC posting. Try posting under an actual IDENTITY and stop hiding. Maybe then people will know you're doing more than spewing BS.


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!

  • Well, maybe great minds just think alike. But about six months ago I posted these web pages [mindspring.com] to my website.

    I never linked those pages from anywhere else or posted URLs anywhere that I recall. It's exactly the same idea he's got. I wonder if I said something to somebody and it got back to Kasparov? That would somehow be incredibly cool.

  • I'm afraid not as they are all Windows users
  • Umm.... The chances of winning most lotteries is somewhere around 1 in 80 million. I'd put my money on someone beating Kasparov any day of the week.

    Lotteries are nothing more than a way to get stupid people to fund schools and other state projects.

    (And yes I do play when the prize goes above $100 million, but I like to think of it as donation to schools rather than a chance at millions).

  • That would be so much cooler.
    Set a date and time, make sure everyone's
    clients are on at that time...
  • I think your parents should spank your prepubescent butt more often.

    ---
  • Any analogy between this effort and the beneficial parts of parallel processing will most likely be wrong. The processing is uncoordinated so every compute node (person) must go through the same computations. Thousands of times more computing power with all parts geting about the same distance towrds the solution. The only benefit of this system is fault-tolerance, the stupid nodes get voted down.

    The end result will be that the effective chess ability of the group will be the average (or slightly higher if they pay attention to the experts) of the group.
  • That would be the point. It's arbitrary, but it was infering that Chess (invented how many thousands of years ago) should have racial undertones... Or at least that is what the media would pick up on.
    Time flies like an arrow;

  • The "world" team can never win if moves are decided by ballot. The reason for this is that there is no chance that enough people would understand the strategy and tactics involved, so most people would vote for bad moves.

    Now here's the reactionary bit, and only half tongue-in-cheek... Why would a strategy that woudn't win a chess game be good enough to run a country? What are the chances that your average punter can make the best decision on macro-economics, ethics, or foreign policy? Does anyone out there actually believe that a bunch of glorified public entertainers, voted into power by the ignorant masses, desperate to keep themselves in kickbacks and armour-plated limousines could possibly be an optimal way to reach public wellbeing?

    George Bernard Shaw once said that democracy is a method of ensuring that people are governed no better than they deserve. Someone else said that its a way to allow people to oppress themselves. I'm sure you can come up with enough issues to illustrate the truth of these statements yourself...

    So here's my solution. Let's take over the world, and start an open source government. No secrets, no lies, no politicians. Every suggestion gets judged purely by merit, good ones percolate to the top, bad ones disappear. Since there is no presidential term, we could affoard to take the long-term view, since we don't need to please voters, we can affoard to make unpleasant but neccesary decisions, since people are judged by merit, we never need to suffer under an ill-informed decision again...

    In short, Linus for president!

  • [aldo putting on his serious chess hat]

    Yerm... I think you're wrong about Fischer and Capablanca. These guys were great geniuses, and their games were inspiring, daring and brilliant. But if one of these two (or any of the other great grandmasters of the past, for that matter) had to play Kasparov today they would lose badly. Even if they were in peak form. The reason is that chess is a different game from what it was even as little as twenty years ago. Today's grandmasters get trained in the latest and greatest advances in opening theory, and supported in analysis by computers and massive databases. The advances in opening theory alone would be enough to give a decisive advantage in something like half the games.

    But I think that even if there was some way of comparing native talent, totally divorced from training and theory, the greatest player of all time is none of the three players mentioned.
    Murpy would give them all a run for their money...
  • These sorts of games have long been a part of chess history. Depending on how the moves are decided, the consulting team can bring a lot of ingenuity to bear on the game.

    A move a day is reasonably fast, so the game should stay interesting.

    mp
  • Has anyone thought about writting a distributed client to come up with an entire game tree for chess? I mean, yeah it would be huge - but then wouldn't it be interesting to find out the exact paths to victory at every turn - or at least the most likely paths - no more fuzzy logic etc - or maybe I'm just talking out my ass...just a thought, though.
  • I'd like to see Kasparov against a distributed chess program ala distributed.net. Maybe we could get Deep Blue out of retirement for a match against a world-wide distributed chess program.
  • Not at all, alive and well, but it's called Cosm [mithral.com] now.
  • That's a good idea, but it's like the Go tourney's for computer programs, all it tests is the programs ability to play chess, not the Holy War(tm) that one would hope would arise...

    M
  • To be correct, 50% are below median, not below average (mean).
  • While I don't dispute that Kasparov will win as handily as if he were playing one novice player (if not more so), that is not why we have elected officials. The simple fact is it takes too long and costs too much to have votes on every little issue that comes up. Or at least, that is why the system was set up originally. Nowadays the system perpetuates itself because those involved have an interest that it do so. Sure, we could have online polls to decide whether or not to bomb the hell out of a third world country, but first all the elected officials would have to give up their power and six figure pension.

    Off topic I know, but this thread isn't that deep. It's like asking who would win a race between a cheetah and a thousand people with their ankles tied together.


    There are times when it is necessary to speak.

  • Argh! (Score:1)

    by Athos ( 11806 )
    It thinks my proxy (the one my stoopid ISP forces me to go through) thinks I'm using MSIE 3.0.

    This is hilarious, in fact.

    --

  • people can't do the type of parralel computing together, sorry. At least not the sort of computing that is necacery for chess. the voting method is stupid since the most common or obvious move to a large body of people will rarly be the best move.

    also there will be no strategy and no cognative forward thinking. I don't see this working.

    This problem also highlights one of the problems of democracy, actually.. if you look at the goas curve 50% of people are below average.. (still for governing contries democracy is the best known method out of all the other options..)


    --------------------------------
    ( my music [mp3.com])
  • "It's like asking who would win a race between a cheetah and a thousand people with their ankles tied together."

    definetly!
    --------------------------------
    ( my music [mp3.com])
  • Yep, on the 1995 fall tour, a huge chessboard would drop out of the ceiling, and the band and the audience would each make a few moves. A chess player who was at one of the shows tells more about it here [chessworks.com]. I think it's the only time a rock (or jazz) band ever did this...;)
  • I think not.

    I shutter to see this at the bottom of each page:
    © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
  • It appears this is only able to run on Windows. There doesn't seem to be a Linux equivilent for the plugin you need. If there is one out there, could you point it out to me? This sounds like a cool ides.
  • Isn't Bobby dead? If not - - this is what I would like to see happen. Or have Gary take on Deep Blue again. I bet he could take him in another contest.
  • Good. He's great at chess.

    Doesn't anyone get tired of this sort of grandstanding? It would be an interesting experiment tho.

    How many possible moves would there be on average for people to vote on? How long is the voting period per move?
  • I think that the human-conglomerate will lose, and I don't think it will say much about humanity, either.

    Deep Blue was the product of a lot of work, time, and effort on the part of a great deal of engineers, computer scientists, and grandmasters. First, remember that Deep Blue was (is) a multiprocessor machine. All of this "Distrubited.net" stuff is basically what it did.

    Even if we assume that all of these people everywhere each "examine" different moves, Deep Blue had something many people never had. It learned chess (the technique, anyway) from grandmasters. It had a library of grandmaster games that it could pick out situations from to see how a move might turn out. That is, it could take its current situation and see if it had happened before, what that grandmaster did, and whether that grandmaster won or lost because of it. It was also beta tested by playing games with current grandmasters and had its "style" refined through their comments and suggestions.

    I've talked with the man who was in charge of the Deep Blue project; and I believe that generally Deep Blue has a lot of advantages that humanity doesn't (at least when it comes to chess). Considering that Deep Blue barely beat Kasparov the second time, humanity in this case stands naught a chance. (IMHO)
  • Let me guess, you're probably not a computer programmer?

    "A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: 'How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?'

    'It will take one year,' said the master promptly.

    'But we need this system immediately, or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?'

    The master programmer frowned. 'In that case, it will take two years.'

    'And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?'

    The master programmer shrugged. 'Then the design will never be completed,' he said."

    (from The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James)
  • This has some neat ramifications. If one assumes two things: one that people have something that a computer doesn't namely intuition, but a simple computer program can measure the "goodness" of two possible moves, then one should be able to combine the two. The plan then is that people submit their moves based on their intuition or whatever and then the computer finds the relative goodness of the moves. Spending more time on those moves that people think are "better" and less on those that people think are "worse." This way the computer benifits from the agragate skills of many people, but mantains that same computational power unique to it's breed.
  • Sounds like a good idea....

    If Deep Blue can beat him, then why shouldn't thousands of people be able to?
  • there's no way in hell the MS-team will beat Gary and Co

    I wouldnt be so sure, I could just see it now...

    Gates: So Gary, are you ready for the big game?
    Kasparov: Yes, you know that I can't possibly lose.
    Gates: I wouldn't be so sure Gary.
    Kasparov: Please, Chess by committee?
    Gates: I know you find it hard to believe, but you will lose this match.
    Kasparov: That is impossible!
    Gates: Then I want you to meet my friend, the man who makes the impossible possible...
    Enter Don King
    Don King: OK, time is short. This is how it is going to go down...
    Don King Explains the Plan to Gary.
    Kasparov: You mean, lose intentionally? Following this preposterous script?
    Gates: Yes, and I'll even throw in 500 million dollars for your effort.
    Kasparov: But why?
    Gates: I have a PR problem, people are starting to think that Windows users are stupid.
    Kasparov: Well, yes...
    Gates: So I rigged the website to eliminate all Linux users by saying their poor excuse for a browser is 16 bit, heheh
    Then we will prove the intellectual superiority of Windows users forever!
    Fade to Black


  • Everyone here is smart enough to know a room full of monkeys will not beat Kasparov. But what if both sides are played by huge groups of (non-cooperating) players?

    I saw a cool demo at SIGGRAPH where the left side of the audience played Pong against the right side. Each person in the audience had a colored "wand" that a was read by a computer on the stage in real-time. Each wand was binary, having two different colors. The computer would calculate a general consensus, either "move paddle UP" or "move paddle DOWN". This sounds chaotic, but the audience learned to play smoothly very quickly!

    On a more frightening note, that SIGGRAPH demo also featured an audience consensus driven Flight Simulator! Imagine airlines down-sizing their pilots to save money: "We'll just let the passengers fly the plane using their general consensus!" ;-D

  • WOOO I was at that SIGGRAPH! I'm guessing it was 1992 or so.

    As I recall, the pong game was much more successful.

    This is a good analogy. You can play pong by consensus (and it happens to be a problem that can be easily parallelized) but flying a plane isn't.

    Add me to the list of people who think chess by consensus is a completely braindead idea.

    BTW. There were other cool things. They had an overhead graphical representation of what the pattern of red and blue was, and they had a little card that told you an order of things to do (just like at football game) so it would make pretty patterns on the display.

    Also, at this Siggraph was the start of a war between graphic "artists" and graphic "scientists"

    Up until this era, most computer animation was done like regular animation, where artists would interpret and dictate how a given character or object would move.

    There was a group of less "arty" minded programmers that had started on using constraint based physical modeling to do the actual animation, with startling results. This pissed off many of the artists, who would rather animate say, a bowl of jello, by hand.

    Needless to say, the constraint based jello model was frightengly convincing, wheras constraint based modeling of a human being walking was pathetic.

    It was a great contrast.
  • No suprise. Microsoft owns the zone. Not that I would recommend boycotting microsoft funded events or anything.
  • OK... we watched Big Blue play against a person... we know the power (and lack of power) of a computer against a living chess master.

    Let's battle it out against computers.... Big Blue vs. Internet based distributed computing. Heck, I would spare my idle CPU cycles for something like that. The best part is.... they could play for weeks... humans slow the process down. Once you can prove that some form of Internet based distributed computing can consistantly beat the super-computer, then we can take on a real person.

    If Big Blue can't always beat a human, why should we trust distributed computing, unless you can prove it can beat the machine that lost to a human?

    Just my $.02 worth...
  • well people can "think together" that's the consept behind almost any organization whatsoever... I think. if peopel had a few months to discus things, in threads or somthing, we might have a chance. but voteing? I think you would just end up with an "average" player
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • I use windows
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • Fifty!?! maybe 5 or 6 if any, and it probably dosn't have much to do with intelegence witch OS you use... people who love computers are usualy smart, people who love computers like linux. linux and intelegence are not intrensicacly linked... 50 points is enough to fit almost everyone on earth (between 80 and 130).. I wouldn't be surprized if I was 50 points higher then you (i'm ~146) you seem to be pretty stupid
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • on the other hand, if we were to play aganst the worst chess player, we would win.... no question, democracy keeps the governement at a compitance/evilness level as the general public, while one person *may* be better, they may also be worse the current system, while horibly broken, is still better then that risk
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • Now that I think about it, chess sucks ass... Go is so much cooler. it's amazing simple, and yet a million times more complex a computer cannot *thoreticaly* beat a human in go, I think...
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • Actually, it is known that a team of diverse approaches will come to more innovative solutions than a team of experts, who may all think the same way. The diverse team does want some experts, a team of total idiots is not the point here. The experts cannot beat Kasparov thinking as they normally do. So perhaps some unexpected moves by the non-experts will put them in positions they are unused to but that they can then actually leverage to beat Kasparov.

    Exactly how each move is decided, and how much planning and discussion goes on, will have a huge impact on whether the team can actually win. But if done properly, I think they have a chance.
  • As someone noted earlier, a single grandmaster would probably be more of an opponent than "the world", but away from "serious" chess, he got mentioned in the newspapers again.
  • Um... NO! Wrong! Well, except in the part about Go being much cooler. First of all, computers have beaten humans at Go many times. So far, no program has beaten any dan-level (professional level) players, AFIAK; there is no theoretically reason for this, however. It has more to do with the practical reason that in Go there are almost always an extremely vast number of possible moves, so the best way to figure out the best move is by being able to recognize patterns. People are better than computers at recognizing patterns than computers. While this means it is *unlikely* that a program will beat a *really good* human, it does not mean that it is theoretically impossible.
  • It's a travesty, I tell you! A travesty! (God, sarcasm just does *not* work in print. I've got to stop trying. People always think I'm serious.)

    --
    Wonko the Sane

  • required to beat--and usually even draw with--Kasparov and his gang of advisors.

    This is, I think, what everybody is forgetting...it isn't 'the world vs Kasparov', but 'the world vs. the top 10 chess minds in the world'...there's no way in hell the MS-team will beat Gary and Co., they have been playing like a team for waaaay too long :)

    BTW, I don't belive Kasparov is the best player of modern times...Fisher or Capablanca would beat his butt 9 out of every 10 games :)

    Vox

  • I have to agree with you on this too...I've tried this 'team chess' approach a couple of times, and it sucks :) Unless you have a team with the same playing style and with one person taking the decisions after the rest of the team proposes approaches, team play is not something that will ever work with chess.

    The only way to make teamwork function in chess is the way GMs do it...they have advisors who know the playing style and preferences of the GM, and offer him options, but in the end it is the GM who decides.

    There's things for which democracy sucks, and this is one of them :)

    Vox

  • How about having the plug-in shared as source?

    The page says my Netscape 4.07 is 16-bit.
  • It said Netscape 4.07 is 16-bit!
  • I'm in hell. Bellboy get my luggage.
  • Go represents what I think of intelligence the fewer rules you need to maintain a feedback loop the more intelligent and power the entity is.

  • Get teams of programmers for the distributed client. And then see which programmers come up with the best chess program.

    The besides a Mac team vs. a Linux team, you could have Gnome vs. KDE teams or vi vs. emacs teams, etc.

  • If you know a thing or two about democracy then you know that the general public and its opinions are STUPID. It's quite obvious who is going to win (Kasprov you idiot).

    Let's say that a bunch of retards decide to take part in the game. Their votes will then affect the decision. Now, let's say a bunch of grandmasters also take part. Their votes will affect the decision. And undoubtibly, the majority of people won't be retards and they won't be grandmasters.

    The decision, therefor, will be that of an average person. So, in a sense, this is a match between an average person and the world's greatest chess players.
  • Surely, the next project of that kind will be to compose music that way. One note per day, selected by voting :) Gonna be a great song... ;)
  • he'll win, because all of my personal chess skills will be voting against him. With that and a million more bozos like me, what chance will the experts have?
    -aiabx
  • Here in the Netherlands (and I suppose in other countries as well), there have been matches like this forever. The matches are played in radio programs and people call in to cast their vote. Now of course internet is better suited for something like this, but the idea is very old.
  • (And yes I do play when the prize goes above $100 million, but I like to think of it as donation to schools rather than a chance at millions).

    I play every so often. Thinking about what I'd do with the millions of dollars is worth the $5 to me. Much more fun than spending $8 to watch a crappy movie in the theatre.
  • It was five of us at a friend's house one night. He (the acknowledged best player, but not by that much) put up eight dollars to our two bucks each. I put in money to make it interesting, but refused to play because I realized we had no chance. Surprisingly, they were doing pretty well into the late midgame. Then they had a tricky situation with a bishop. It turned out that each of the four of us were suggesting a different move; we finally decided on my choice, and then the single player got us with a simple bishop fork that somehow none of us noticed and we lost a rook. So much for that game. We were so busy aruging about which move to make, we missed an obvious fork.

    Like the rest of you, I think this Kasparov thing will be a total failure with an easy win for GK. Although the site said something about the moves being suggested by GM's... If that's so, and people get to vote amoung four good moves, it might last a while. GK will still win, but it at least might take a while.
  • If the world allowed to cheat, resurrect "Deep Blue", load it up with the latest and fastest PowerPC chips, and let it think about each move for 24 hours? That's "our" only chance of beating Mr. Kasparov! Of course, I would still bet on Kasparov with 24-hour moves. A committee (voting, no less!) stands no chance at all.

    Disclaimer: this opinion is based on the vast (heheh) knowlege of chess I acquired gradually learning to beat "Mr. Jett" as a teenager in the downtown library. But mostly what I learned is that when you regularly start to beat someone, they stop showing up. ;)
  • You guys are missing the whole point of this publicity stunt!
    Microsoft WANTS Gary to Win.

    Why?

    Simple.. think about what that would prove -- one person who knows what he's doing and can execute freely is better than a million people who have to decide by commitee.

    Microsoft is making a statement about the way Internet standards are created. Their message is clear: Trust us to make the standards. We can do it faster and better than any committee.

    ..and in an ideal world they might be right.

  • I suppose the only reason to draw a connection to Microsoft is because they are sponsoring the event.
  • The stupid nodes will only get voted down if there are less of them. I think it's a distinct possibility that the clueless will outnumber the, er, clue-full.

  • Many chess players move depending on how the opponent is moving, by recognizing a strategy or classic move sequence. If his opponent is moving completely random, he might not know the best way to counteract it.

    Just a thought. I'm no chess champion (or even a frequent player).
  • Microsoft Windows is one of the base requirements for participation in the Zone.
  • Kasparov is the top rated player among millions of rated chess players. The average chess player has a better chance of winning the lottery than beating Kasparov.

    It is ridiculous to assume that a concensus, which pretty much amounts to an average, will pose any sort of challenge to him.
  • It's your choice, BigEd. Either way your wallet becomes lighter.

    At least with the lottery you could use the social improvement rationalization to feel better about parting with the money.

  • kasparov vs. everyone (Score:5)

    by conform ( 55925 ) on Friday June 18, 1999 @01:06PM (#1843313)
    this seems a bit predictable to me. the result will undoubtedly be that kasparov will win in a firly high but not huge number of moves. there is virtually no danger of either the "world" team winning, or having a particularly interesting game, as the vast majority of people following this game will be patzers who will pick a random move recommended by one of the analysts. the moves will all be safe, and predictable.

    i don't believe that a group of people will ever be likely to beat the world champion. even a small group of grandmasters has a worse chance than any single one. it's a hallmark of top-level chess to make and execute a plan, and as soon as there is any on-board indecision about the plan, there is a weakness to exploit. multiple grandmasters are far more likely to have indecision about their plans than just one.

    when i first heard the offer, i thought that it was going tobe kasparov playing an unlimited-game simul. which would be a Good Thing. especially since one of my coworkers pointed out that he could save a lot of time, especially in the beginning, because there would undoubtedly be a lot of people making the same first move, and then a lot of those people would make the same second move, etc.

    --seamus

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