Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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You are missing some or all of the point here. Computers are not 'better' at chess than humans, they are simply faster and have access to more and more perfect forms of memory.

Humans learn a few simple rules and combine that with a motivation to win and suddenly 'know how to play chess' with some ability after a few hours, days or weeks. To become a master at the game takes a lot more study but in general people can learn how to play chess with some ease.

You are the one who is taking it seriously! Games are meant to be enjoyed, not to be taken too serious and even the big 'names' from chess play the game as a way to pit their wits against others. The way they arrive at their solutions is totally unrelated to the way computers arrive at theirs.

Imagine if you showed up to a chess contest armed with a veritable library of chess books, a history of all the grand master games ever played, their openings and evaluation of the mid games that came out of those openings and a near infinite number of assistants that are willing to play your current board position through large number of variations to see the possible outcomes of potential moves.

I think the key to continued enjoyment in spite of the fact that computers are 'better' at this is that they indeed arrive by a way that between humans would be considered cheating.

Be impressed by how much resistance our humble brains can put up in the face of such an onslaught and realize that we are the ones that are 'better' at it because no computer that ever got 'taught' chess was any good at all. It takes the combined elements of vast pre-programmed storage and brute force to make it to the higher classes in chess and that has nothing to do with 'playing chess'.

I agree with most of your point, but have to quibble with the assertion that computers are not "better" at chess. Deep Blue was able to beat arguably the greatest chess player ever. Computer chess programs today are far stronger than Deep Blue, and could almost certainly defeat any human player. The way they decide moves is different that humans, but it is also objectively better at achieving the goal (of winning).

At a power budget that literally dwarfs the power expended by the human. At the current state of technology it is an uneven match by a significant margin.

Computers are 'better' not when they reach the goal via the same path as humans do but when all other factors being equal (size, power consumption, access to pre-programmed data and so on) they beat the best human player. And I don't think we're there yet, deep blue was not a universal computer by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't believe the power budget dwarfs a human's, at least not in a measurable way. Resources online suggest that the human brain probably uses about 20 watts. Small laptops don't use much more than that, I don't think, and a small laptop can probably beat any human at chess (since Kramnik lost to a 2006 version of Fritz running on a Core 2 Duo with a crippled tablebase.)

That's an impressive feat, what I remember of the 'deep blue' match was that it was a special purpose rig with thousands of FPGAs wired up with chess specific circuitry.

Iirc the Kramnik match was not exactly a show of strength for Kramnik, also, he is not the current ruling world champion in chess (though he was when he lost that match, but that's why we keep on playing tournaments, the current champion is this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand).

That said, Fritz is imo a very impressive piece of software, much more so than deep blue ever was.

edit: I just looked at the wikipedia entry, the 'crippling' was with respect to the end-game tables, typically that's not a really big deal unless you have the bad luck to end in an end game where you need those tables, in that case such a game usually ends in a draw. In none of the games that were played that seems to have made much difference, and Kramnik messing up was what sealed the match.

About the tablebases, I disagree; having a more extensive tablebase means that you can short-circuit calculations earlier in the game (because you immediately know the evaluation if your calculation results in a tablebase position.) So it helps even if you don't actually end up playing into a six-or-less-piece endgame. It's obviously hard to say, but it's certainly conceivable that it hurt Fritz's play in a few of the games which wound up being drawn. I didn't mention it, but another condition of the match greatly favoring Kramnik was that the computer's opening book was completely open to him as well -- he could view all of Fritz's move weightings and statistics during the openings (an attempt at "fairness" given the computer's theoretically more extensive knowledge.)

If you're not aware, Fritz is also no longer at the top of the heap in computer chess. http://www.rybkachess.com/

> About the tablebases, I disagree;

Agreed, thank you for your expansion on this, I had not thought through the consequences.

I have more respect and interest in creative activities that are far beyond what computers can do.

You mean like chess, circa 1994?

Writing a chess program is a creative activity :)

What computers 'can do' is limited by our imagination and our ability to express ourselves. As Kasparov points out in the article as soon as IBM had the publicity they wanted (to win from the best human chess player at any cost) they scrapped the project.

But the contest was meaningless the way it was posed anyway. Personally I think that the best way to deal with the situation would have been to 'handicap' the computer to use the same amount of resources that the human has access to, so a given power budget and no access to pre-programmed libraries. That would make the contest much more interesting, and more importantly would drive forward our thinking about solving this sort of problem in an intelligent way instead of using the sledge-hammer of brute force.

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