Kramnik Ties Fritz; Machines Not Yet Our Masters 241
Maltov writes "World Chess Champion V. Kramnik ties his match against the software Fritz. Details here.
You can also check out a picture gallery and a short history of computer chess."
Not masters, but equals (Score:5, Insightful)
Machines won't be nearly our equals in life for some time though, as the fixed-rules of a chess tournament bears little resemblance to the forsight, logic, and sometimes blind chance of human life.
Too many people seem to think of Terminator2-esque type scenarios with intelligent machines when talking about this, but Chess is just a little sandbox in a big beach.
Yeah but Fritz isn't the best player (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We can at best hope a tie.. (Score:1, Insightful)
> If two chess players play perfectly, then the game will always result in a tie.
It goes deeper than chess knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
In the first games, Kramnik played very solid, positional chess, and slowly but surely, just walked over Fritz.
In game 5, Kramnik made his first human error, blundering in a difficult position, and losing immediately because of this. It might have been because he was tired or for thousand other reasons, we don't know.
But we know human weakness #1: we make mistakes, and can't handle every similar situation perfectly, computers can.
In game 6, Kramnik went for a gamble, sacrificing material to get a decisive attack. Kasparov had made the same mistake when playing against Deep Blue - his attack would have been devastating against any human, but one should never, ever attempt a tactical gamble against a computer because that's where they are strongest.
Human weakness #2: we underestimate our partners, computers don't.
In games 7 and 8, the score was tied, and Kramnik played very cautiously, clearly being afraid of a loss. If he had played at his best and avoided mistakes that he had made in games 5 and 6, he might have won, but he decided not to go for it.
Human weakness #3: we get scared, computers don't.
Re:It goes deeper than chess knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
comparing apples to oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays, there really is very little point. You are comparing apples to oranges when you allow the one party a nearly infinite budget of cycles and power and allow the other party 18 cycles per second on a biological processor that is running on a couple of oranges for a whole games' worth of computation.
I we want to make this kind of competition interesting again I think there really should be limits on the power and cycle budget of the machine involved in order to get back to the essence of the whole game theory thing, which is not going flat out for the maximum number of ply you can look ahead but to try to quantify a strategic advantage.
Unfortunately that will not make for interesting press releases.
To me the current 'matches' look a little bit like sledgehammers being used to crack nuts. It does work, but there is no real output. All this stuff proves is that if you throw enough money at a problem you can force the outcome of something as trivial as a game of chess.
It does not advance the state of the art in computing at all.
Re:Machines Not Yet Our Masters? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not masters, but equals (Score:3, Insightful)
An E. coli bacterium doesn't even have trillions of working parts, or even billions or millions. Junk DNA doesn't count here.
As opposed to our most powerful computers, where any of trillions (this time literally) of transistors (which in and of themselves aren't the simplest devices on Earth) can potentially affect any other transistor in the system a few hundred steps down the road, going at a billion steps a second.
Just because we can't replicate all of the steps to reconstruct a bacterium doesn't mean we haven't made anything more complex than it.
Re:We can at best hope a tie.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Chess, to me, is a General mashaling troops to battle. Go is like a child playing in the sandbox - having fun, exploring, trying new ideas, making castles.
It's not Man vs. Machine... (Score:5, Insightful)
Kramnik and Kasparov are the best chess players that nature can produce. Meanwhile, humans have built Fritz and Deep Blue. We aren't in the process of losing to machines. We're in the process of beating nature.
Hm, a draw... (Score:2, Insightful)
What's more disappointing than the draw, however, is that this match was not nearly as publicized as Deep Blue vs. Kasparov.
Re:comparing apples to oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're missing part of the point of this entire affair. It's not necessarily about computer science, and many people that are looking for the CS value in this may well be bored. But as a story about _chess_, this is facinating.
While your points about how brute forcing the issue may not be very interesting technically, I have found, following this story and the previous iterations of the same, that I am facinated the diffrences between human chess and computer chess. Clearly, Kramnik is playing a very different sort of chess than the one that Fritz plays. Where human chess is intuitive and often highly psychological (Kramnik may well have won this match if he hadn't resigned a possible drawn position), computer chess is calculated and totally passionless. The brute-force approach being taken to teach computers to play better chess produces chess players that won't often make interesting sacrifices; computers are notoriously materialistic in chess. But computer defence is appalingly good; Kasparov could often scare opponents into lost positions with an aggressive attack, and the linked story on this match mentions a similar circumstance , but computers play a frightening defence. Computers never get scared, never make a mistake, and know exactly what's going on in the next five turns. If there's a bizzare line of play that produces a strange but favorable board, humans will often overlook it, as human intuition often passes outre solutions by, but a computer player will take the game places that a human might never. On the other hand, a computer cannot see fifteen turns into the future, with perfect accuracy but no hard data, the way a human player can.
Re:We can at best hope a tie.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That game is deterministic, sequential, no draws are possible, and with perfect play the second player wins.
Has anyone actually seen the games? (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD sponsorship (Score:1, Insightful)
Chess is a game (Score:1, Insightful)
The computer will have beaten us at chess when it becomes a more interesting person to be around than a human (some geeks may think this is already the case; they will discover, to their detriment, that they are wrong).
Re:We can at best hope a tie.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The paper cited above is interesting as it shows what some computer scientists think about the difficulty of a computer playing ever playing go. However, to put it in proper perspective it should also be remembered that before the 1980's computer scientists and chess players are also of the belief that computers cannot be made to play chess. What a difference two decades make!
However, let me point out the following two quotes from Burmeister and my personal opinion on these.
These two quotes show the state of Go programming today:
Point two is what most people who have an opinion on the computer chess vs computer go debate fail to consider. The fact that computers play chess by brute force searching of tries does not mean that that approach is, ergo, the only possible approach to computer go.
In fact a bit of computer chess history should dispel that notion. When researchers first tried to tackle the problem of computer chess, it was rather obvious that a brute force approach is not the ideal way to do it. The number of possible positions in chess is so huge that it is not possible to solve chess using the technology available at that time. Instead they went for the heuristic approach.
In this approach researches looked for a function Eval(p) such that given a position p, Eval(p) will evaluate whether one side is ahead or not. If Eval(p) is found, so they think, then it is possible to use a greedy algorithm to chess. The computer simply picks that position p_n where Eval(p_n) is a maximum. No need for brute force! Unfortunately Eval(p) proved intractable because of one aspect of chess: sacrifice. In a chess sacrifice, Eval(p) is screwed up by the temporary giving up of an advantage (material, or position) in order to gain a future advantage. It turned out that there is no way to program a chess computer without look-ahead. And that is essentially how all computer's today play chess, by brute force lookahead coupled with other heuristics.
The state of computer go is not yet that advanced for either me or anyone to say for certainty that there is no Eval(p) for go. But if, as I suspect (let's just say it's a gambler's gut-feeling reinforced, in fact, by a reading of Burmeister plus the fact that go stones cannot move and thus their present fixed position must contribute to Eval(p)) there is in fact an Eval(p) for go, then go will prove to be easier to program than chess.
All the above is my opinion only. There goes my karma.
Re:We can at best hope a tie.. (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, the article you refer to is six-years old; perhaps things have slightly changed in the computer Go world since then? E.g., Gnu Go has become much better this past year, and so have others, probably.
Play some Go seriously, you'll understand better why computers still have a long way to Go...
Re:Not masters, but equals (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you go about demeaning any form of life to being simpler than a computer, perhaps you should try to gain some understanding of the complexity of even the most "simple" life.
I'm certainly not going to get into a long drawn out discussion over this, however. Your claims are groundless. Life boils down to a process, regardless of the complication of the process it CAN be reproduced. "Never" is a strong word, and you should be more careful how you throw it around. The fact that we don't currently know how a single cell works in it's entirety, that is no argument for the stance that we will never know. More importantly, it's not even necessary for an artificial intelligence to function in the same manner as human intelligence, or anumal intelligence for that matter. You're confusing function with form. It is entirely possible that an idea, could come about that allows a computer to think in a radically different way, process wise, than a living creature, but it could still be said to think.
It simply does not matter how a machine performs it's job. Whether it's a wetware computer, or a silicon brain, the determining factor is behavioral in nature. Meaning that only through analysis of something's behavior can we determine whether or not it has intelligence, there is no other way. Arguments that focus on the material makeup up the subject being examined, not only miss the point entirely, they are an exercise in futility.
Re:Dateline (Score:1, Insightful)
Wimps!
Re:Hm, a draw... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that is because it is old news. The Deep Blue game showed that computerized chess *can* beat top humans. This new game did not tell us anything much different, except that maybe it might be a while before computers completely dominate rather than play close games.
If the score was very lopsided, then it may have made news. However, the way it did come out it did NOT make the Deep Blue episode look like a fluke, and that is why it is ignored, more or less.
The Deep Blue game was THE coming out party for the machine. One party is enough. Nobody wants to christen a ship twice.