Author: Pekka Karjalainen
Date: 11:14:22 02/22/01
Go up one level in this thread
On February 22, 2001 at 12:51:34, Graham Laight wrote: >My judgement is that chess modified this way would lower the playing standards >of the computers far more dramatically than it would the humans, and thus allow >us to start beating them easily again. Please don't say "chess modified" as no one with any sense is going to stop playing the perfectly fine game of chess. Making and experimenting with these variants would be interesting, though, but they will not replace chess. They can live beside it, perhaps. For xiangqi there exists a long tradition of analysis, mainly in the Chinese language and thus the level of top human play is already very high. Whether top programs can beat top GM's in that game, I don't know. I also doubt there has been as much effort put into the top programs as there has been for chess. Xiangqi has a somewhat larger branching factor than chess. It also is typically describe as much more tactical game than chess. There are no long pawn chains to be made in it, for example. Just five pawns and they work differently. For Shogi there are master level programs, but top humans are still way ahead of them. Is it because of the larger board and more pieces? Or is it because of the drop rule which makes it a whole different boardgame? I don't know. It is too a well-analysed game and quite popular in Japan. Perhaps the game to test this hypothesis would be Chu Shogi. There are a few enthusiasts for that game in Japan and around the world, some of which are quite good at it. It is played on a 12x12 board with numerous strange pieces that promote to numerous other (even stranger) pieces. It has quite a huge branching factor compared to chess. You can find info on these in http://www.chessvariants.com Unlike Uri Blass, I do not think that humans are bad programmers and that is the only reason why there are no programs that beat humans at these games. I think the human brain is so versatile that it can play certain types of games much better than any fancy computer processor we will be able to build in at least 30 years, no matter how well it is programmed. For some very special brains this is still true of chess, no matter the years of effort spend at making chess computers and it will be so for quite a while. The brain is my second favorite organ. Let's hear it for the human brain :-) Pekka Karjalainen
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.