Mr_Minderbinder

While I do not doubt that that machine would have had good chances against Kasparov, the author throws around various Elo ratings for computers with more authority and certainty than is warranted. The simple fact is we do not have a reliable estimate of how strong Stockfish on a modern desktop is let alone a port of SF to a Pentium Pro machine in terms of FIDE Elo. Every time this subject comes up the various estimates put forward differ by hundreds of Elo points.

> ...because humans don't play against engines very frequently, there can be some small divergences between scores on the FIDE Elo ladder and the CCRL ladder…

This is precisely the problem. There are very few games between FIDE-rated players and CCRL-rated “players” under tournament conditions. The question of what FIDE rating a given CCRL rating would be equivalent to has been analysed extensively before and “small divergences” would be quite the understatement: https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?t=59332

In general ratings obtained purely by computer vs computer play are known to exaggerate the differences between computers compared to their performance against humans. This was known and discussed as far back as the 80s.

Ultimately the only way to discover the true strength of “Pentium Pro-fish” is for it to play a large number of games against FIDE-rated humans under strict tournament conditions.

> But if you happen to know a 2700+ Super GM who wants to try and defeat a 2026 chess engine playing on 1996 hardware, I'd be happy to accept the challenge!

Hikaru Nakamura? Has a history of playing chess computers in various odds matches and it could be interesting “content” for his entertainment brand. But really any of them might be interested if the financial terms were satisfactory.

> I don't know how to estimate how much that would lower its Elo.

A common rough rule of thumb used throughout the 2010s (because it no longer holds) in computer chess was that a 2x speedup gives about 50 Elo. This mostly holds in that region but at low levels it is more like 100-200 points.

> Could a modern chess engine run on a Cray 1? 386? 68k?

Someone built Stockfish for the Pentium (586), 486 and 386 a while ago: https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?t=63857

> Stockfish was the first to use hard data instead of vibes, when selecting algorithms and heuristics.

I am half remembering a post from more than a decade ago but a process similar to Fishtest was supposedly used for Rybka. But in general I agree.

There is a useful GPTZero-based provenance tool for editors (and readers) to check if a page contains AI-generated text:

https://wikipedia.gptzero.me/

I doubt if it is even possible for anyone to make rigorous claims about broad software quality over long periods of time. The common discourse over this subject merely consists of sharing anecdotes and speculative pet theories. To answer this question convincingly one would ideally need to take a comprehensive and representative sample across the whole range of software from the past and today and make comparisons across the vast categories of software that exist. Doing this even for today’s software would be a tremendous undertaking for a variety of reasons. Now consider doing it for the past where one must face the simple fact that the vast majority of historic software is lost or incomplete. Even if we have binaries we might not have the source code. Next we may not even have a computer to run the software on. The software that does survive might not be a representative sample of past software-- it may have experienced survivorship bias due to its quality or for some other reason.

The vast majority of software (past or present) is not distributed and therefore difficult to access. So I find when people talk about “software” in this context they often mean commercial “boxed product” software or software that otherwise has an end-user that is the general public rather than “all software”. That is simply the only neighbourhood of the software universe that most people are familiar with. Yet even if we were to restrict ourselves to that category of software there is a complete lack of convincing comprehensive comparisons. And even if there were it might only be an indication of a trend confined to that category of software.

Most commentators suggest the trend concerning software quality continues and may even accelerate in the future. So instead of trying to compare the present with an inaccessible past, why not compare the present with an eventual future? Design objective metrics and/or recruit esteemed judges for subjective assessments, then assess today's software and repeat this assessment a number of years later and compare the metrics.

It feels like the Web is breaking. More and more sites are retreating behind Cloudflare, captchas and PoW defences. When reading Wikipedia on my phone, I have noticed for a while that sometimes half the thumbnails on an article fail to load. Non-corporate browsers are even more unusable than before.

> This release introduces the SFNNv16 network architecture, reducing binary size by removing redundant threat features…

This is nice to see. One of my few gripes with NNUE engines is their huge size compared with the old “HCE” engines I was accustomed to (which were usually hundreds of KiB or low single digit MiBs in size). I will trade off size for superior playing strength but at a certain point it becomes hard to keep justifying a 2x increase in size for what seems like ever diminishing practical returns. I am still searching for a strong NNUE engine that is ~10MiB or less. I have found Marvin, which is small at 1.8 MiB, but it is nowhere near as strong as Stockfish.

I have been wary of the risks surrounding AI since watching Robert Miles on Computerphile more than a decade ago. Since then I have paid at least some attention to developments coming out of AI safety research. Even back then the discussion was fraught with doubt which, given the nature of this topic, was to be expected. It is unfortunate that it is worse now, when the stakes are much higher.

The present looks back at such comments made in the past in that manner.

> People don't want to watch robot chess.

I do and I have for a number of years.

Most people prefer to watch human chess but there are also those who watch computer chess with the same level of enthusiasm:

https://tcec-chess.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCEC

> We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.

Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?

There is no fundamental difference between symbols inscribed on a stone tablet with a sharp tool versus symbols etched onto a reflective disc by a laser. In both cases you are recording symbolic information on a physical medium; they both record digital information.

The true difference between digital and “analogue” lies in the nature of the representation and interpretation of information, that is whether they are descriptions (symbolic) or analogies. The shape of the groove on a phonograph record is an analogy of a sound wave signal. The pits in a compact disc represent numerals which give a description of the amplitude of a signal at a given point in time.

> Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.

There have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.

Thankfully for me it happened a while ago, after chess was conquered. One of the most amusing (and depressing) things in the past few years of the current “AI era” is people making the same claims and having the same discussions about “intelligence” and “creativity” from ten, twenty or thirty years ago as their field is finally coming under attack by AI; they are finally going through what the competitive board game communities (checkers, Othello, chess, shogi, go etc.) have already come to terms with. There was no single moment but a gradual process over decades as the incursion became greater and greater, forcing a recalibration as previously held positions became indefensible. In my own case it spurred me to educate myself in many areas of mathematics, philosophy and neuroscience in particular where I was ignorant and has undoubtedly shaped my understanding of “intelligence”.

When people started claiming LLMs could not produce ideas outside of what they encountered in their training data, I was reminded of an old Chess Life article from the 60s reporting on the first chess computer to play in a tournament at a local chess club. One of the club members remarked that he did not believe that the computer could play moves that were not “put in” the computer in advance. There is an overwhelming sense of “here we go again”.

> I have the original 8080 manual in front of me, and it's very clear they considered them computers to be applied to problems (the first chapter is literally "The Functions of a Computer").

They considered them computers to be applied to a narrow set of problems. That chapter only touches on general computer processor concepts, not applications specific to that processor.

From the first page of that manual - “Applications of the 8080 span from large, intelligent systems terminals to decompression computers for deep sea divers.”

Table 0-2. Microprocessor Applications from the introduction has the following applications listed: “Intelligent Terminals, Gaming Machines, Cash Registers, Accounting and Billing Machines, Telephone Switching Control, Numerically Controlled Machines, Process Control.”

Clearly the intention was embedded or “dedicated” use. It is obvious both from the design and capabilities of the processor as well as the fact that a market for general purpose computers with microprocessors did not exist. Even the “superminicomputer” market was in its infancy in those days. Not a single one of those listed applications is a stand-alone computer system, let alone one that could tackle the whole array of problems expected of computers then. That they call it a “Microcomputer System” is irrelevant; it does not mean what you are suggesting.

> ...a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”

Apparently he was an executive producer, in case anyone else is confused, as I was initially, by the fact that Brian Grazer is credited as producer of that film.

Perhaps you should find an author willing to take the other side of that bet. Make it the literary version of the Levy bet in chess.

A closer biological analogue to an LLM parameter would be a synapse. Estimates vary greatly on how many there are in the human brain, but they are generally on the order of ten to the 14th or 15th power (hundreds of trillions to quadrillions). Using this analogy it is clear that even frontier LLMs, or at least those with publicly disclosed parameter counts, are not yet at the same scale and complexity as the human brain.

> “He warned Brightwell not to tell the bank what the money was for…”

That should have been a red flag.

> If anything, video games were late compared to something like the music industry, where not owning your music has been the status quo for a while now!

My perception is that the music industry is better than other parts of the entertainment industry in this regard. I imagine what the author is thinking of is streaming, which I treat as a sort of on-demand radio. There is an understanding that it is ephemeral. A customer concerned with “owning” their music would not be confused by this and seek another avenue, which in the case of the music industry is both wider, richer and more free than those of adjacent industries.

The common dedicated formats used for distribution: the compact disc and vinyl record, do not have copy protection, which is a better situation than what movies and video games are in. Online music stores invariably deliver you music as a simple computer file, with no copy protection or platform or connectivity requirements. This is the rule rather than the exception, which is not the case when making movie or video game purchases on these types of stores.

> ...many programs used far less than that...

Maybe because those programs were not doing anything as graphically intensive as this. Or perhaps this programs caches more. When OS 9 was relevant were there any programs with comparable capabilities? Such statements are meaningless unless you have insight into how much memory this task should take (and even that is highly variable depending on how one wants to trade-off CPU vs memory usage). Only then can you determine the difference between a “RAM hog” and your computer being too small.

That claim rests on their being the successor to another state (the Ottoman Empire) whose claim rests on the right of conquest. “Roman Emperor” was one of the titles of the Ottoman sultans and it received some recognition from both their subjects (who continued to call themselves “Roman” for centuries) and other states.

I find it surprising that logarithms and e (a.k.a. Napier’s constant), were developed and discovered only relatively recently in the history of mathematics despite how natural and fundamental they are.

The idea of exponential growth and the practice of charging interest in finance are both ancient. Surely an ancient mathematician would have investigated these in depth and discovered what Napier, Bernoulli and others found?

A while ago I was solving several infinite series of exponentials in the context of a problem concerning the half-life of medicines and I made frequent use of logarithms. That is when I started to wonder about their history.

No, just correct.

Your response is scarcely comprehensible. A supposed “preference” for something I had yet to discover? Indeed. Your second charge conflates two categories, so that the conclusion does not follow from the proposition.

It is clear that you have no argument and have devolved into constructing straw men and ad hominem.

> ...browsers older than 2008 can't connect…

TLS 1.2, the standard, may be from 2008 but support for it in browsers did not start to appear until around 2013.

The formulaic and predictable style of that commentary only betrays a lack of effort and conveys no original insight. The disinterest, therefore, is unsurprising. Instead it invites contempt and has accusations of hypocrisy, insincerity and pretentiousness.

The subject of censorship in LLMs and the wider technology world in general has little bearing on this model specifically, that is, a model with a high token speed, which is what is of interest to me here and why I, and I presume many others, chose to read that particular article and this comment thread. It is unnecessary that such a digression should be attaching itself to all manner of threads with only the most remote connection to that subject.

If for no other reason than because this whole genre of commentary has become trite and moreover, is excessively tangential.

Yandex and TinEye satisfy all my reverse image search needs. Google Maps is the only Google service I use. There is simply no substitute for Street View and it is fantastically useful and interesting. Even so it is only a secondary option and I use maps from OpenStreetMap through Organic Maps 90% of the time. I am satisfied if that is the extent of my relationship with them.