Author: Uri Blass
Date: 11:29:35 02/22/01
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On February 22, 2001 at 14:14:22, Pekka Karjalainen wrote: >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 main problem is that humans do not know to define the way that they think. computers are faster than humans in calculations and a thinking game is only calculations. Humans do not know to define the calculation that they do in games and this is the reason that I say that they are bad programmers. Uri
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