The Chess Master and the Computer

Re:The Chess Master and the Computer by bumbledraven on Thursday December 30, 2010 @11:35PM (#2054523)

The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.... Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market.

Here Kasparov misses the mark. Should airplanes flap their wings like birds? Should bicycles have feet? What matters in engineering is the quality of the result, not how the result is achieved.

What's more, the demands of market that Kasparov disparages actually help drive innovation, for if someone were to invent a novel chess program that wipes the floor with all the other programs on the market, is there any doubt it would outsell them?

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Re:The Chess Master and the Computer by solipsist on Friday December 31, 2010 @01:40AM (#2054758)

I liked your analogies, but it's difficult to compare the flapping of birds' wings and the movement of our feet to the extreme complexities of the human brain. In the first two cases, humans have invented more effective ways of doing a task than the biological methods. These examples are elementary compared to the human brain, and they are most likely not to be the most effective ways of doing the tasks - they are only more effective then the current methods. Perhaps if we dissected the processes to a more rudimentary level, we could revise the systems and make them even more effective. However, with simple processes like these it is probably not economically worth it as Kasparov said.

As a result, when you apply these analogies to the human intuition and more complex processes, you are confronted with a dilemma. Our society is reaching a limit where our brute-force methods of recreating systems are no longer working. We are looking too much at the face value of these systems, and thus reaching problems with efficiency and further innovation. In my humble opinion, Kasparov is trying to say that the demands of the market have caused this behavior which benefits in short term, but limits us in the long run. Taking risks to work on a longer-term project of recreating systems at a more fundamental level is what keeps innovation going, and it's time we take it to a new level with respect to human intuition.

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Re:The Chess Master and the Computer by bumbledraven on Friday December 31, 2010 @04:03PM (#2056450)

In the first two cases, humans have invented more effective ways of doing a task than the biological methods.

Kasparov acknowledges that computers are superior to unassisted humans at playing chess, so how is the third case (computer chess) different?

[B]rute-force methods of recreating systems are no longer working.

On the contrary, brute-force algorithms are working better and better as a result of the trend currently known as Moore's law. The faster the hardware, the less intelligent the software running on it has to be to do the same job.

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Re:The Chess Master and the Computer by ars on Friday December 31, 2010 @04:14AM (#2054971)

The fact the human + weak machine far outplays a strong machine should show you that how the result is achieved matters a lot.

The ability of a human to think better than a machine puts them in a completely different classes.

They do not accomplish the same result - they think and calculate different things. In certain tests they may accomplish the same result, but not in all tests.

If they did then a strong machine plus a weak machine should do better than a strong machine alone - but it doesn't.

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