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December 30, 2005
Mate in ... 125 moves
This is the sad reality of the man versus machine dilemma. Will machines be capable enough to beat every strong grandmaster in the future? The answer is: absolutely positively yes!
During his reign as world champion Bobby Fischer was once quoted as saying that if God and he were to play chess the result would be a draw. It was an ambitious and highly pretentious statement at the time. Unfortunately, with today's technology accelerating an alarming rate, we can forget about such ambitions. And there's no sign in stopping these "brute force" thinking juggernauts from taking over chess completely.
When you play against a strong chess program, like Fritz 9 or even Deep Junior - it uses a scoring algorithm to assess the current position into a negative or positive integer. Another algorithm is used to search for the best possible move. This procedure is known as "selective iterative-deepening search" and searches all possible moves to a depth of one first, then all possible moves to a depth of two, then all possible moves to a depth of three and so on.
With any later version of Fritz you can actually see the computer "thinking" while it keeps changing its mind in its decision-making process. Each computer and program varies in strength of course. A good chess program is able to effectively select strong moves through the use of its massive opening database as well as its powerful endgame tablebase fortress.
For instance, a program might give white an advantage of +0.39 if he plays the King's Pawn Opening (1. e4) compared to the closed Queen's Pawn Opening (1. d4) when its assessment is that of +0.24 positional advantage. And really all we are talking about is number-crunching, which incidentally, is the way strong grandmasters win; they reach favorable positions by an accumulation of small advantages.
Anyway, this is the gist of the inner workings of a chess-playing computer. (See previous post on this topic).
Soon it would be safe to say that what we are to apes in the food chain, we are to HAL9000-like computers! (Do you agree, Dave?)
Posted by rene on 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2005
It's your move!
Posted by rene on 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
Art, Chess, Beauty and Depth
A few excerpts from an in-depth interview of classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik and German artist Ugo Dossi.
Vladimir Kramnik: I know many artists, writers and musicians. And an unwontedly high percentage of them play chess. On the other hand, the majority of top players love art. This mutual respect indicates to me that both are indeed similar in essence.
On computeres he states: ...it is interesting to observe how a computer thinks. One can see in its displays and on the monitor how active it is. It calculates every move according to the probability of its chance of winning, compares it to the next move, goes to a third and returns perhaps to the first. During this process it changes its opinion constantly. The disposition to doubt seems to be a prevailing principle in its form of thinking. I cannot say whether this already qualifies as "artificial intelligence", but I think we are on a path in that direction.
Dossi: Neuroscientists say that the perception of beauty is caused by the disbursement of a certain hormone or neuron-transmitter. When this substance is present in an adequate concentration in a particular part of the brain, then it activates a special perception which we call "beauty".
Click here to read this interesting article
Posted by rene on 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Roman's Lab
Be bored to tears....
Posted by rene on 11:04 AM | Comments (1)
A Killer Chess-Computer or Computers that Kill Chess?
Modern chess these days is being brought to you on a new level. Chess is not what it used to be: playing over a cup of coffee, good conversation, a cigar perhaps, and beating your dad on a regular basis. No, I'm talking about the new breed of steel, a totally new incarnation that is capable of making killer calculations faster than you can make mental permutations that pulsate on a high-caffeine latte. I'm referring to hunks of metal — high-end chess-playing machines with fast processors have changed the chess world, presumably, forever.
An article states that Hikaru Nakamura, America's youngest-ever grandmaster, does not have many chess books, and mostly studies with a computer. The same goes for the Norwegian prodigy, Magnus Carlsen. Most kids today might know the latest lines of their favorite opening — 20 moves deep — but rarely study the "classic" games of chess.
Since the well-publicized match of man versus machine — in which IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov on a return match in 1997 — chess computers have become exceedingly better and better at beating humans.
Will this be the end of chess as we used to know it? It's a battle of the mental versus metal.
Posted by rene on 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
