Author: Guido Schimmels
Date: 06:10:14 06/15/98
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On June 14, 1998 at 13:50:19, Don Dailey wrote: >I think a knowledge based approach to computer chess is not elegant at >all. However I use it because I do not see a better approach. My >program keeps accumulating more and more knowledge and seems to keep >improving as a result of it. I'm forced to use this ugly brute force >technique because I do not know a better way. > >At the rate we are going with ram prices plummeting and our computer >memories getting larger and larger, we may someday have as much memory >in our computers as humans have in their heads. Already chess >programs use many megabytes of memory, and if we continue this ugly >trend toward modeling the human brain we will soon have chess programs >requiring huge amounts of memory. This is not a pleasing development >at all and is so wasteful. > >The culmination of all of this might be the 32 man database. This >will be a sad day indeed when a simple table lookup gives you the >right answer in every position. Then our programs will play like >super humans, having instant and perfect intuition in every position. > >My program used to have some clever rules to play king and pawn versus >king correctly. I now have a database, but the two are exactly >equivalent and both return the right answer every time. The program >plays the ending perfectly, just like most strong humans do. In fact, >it's better than the way humans do it because humans use a combination >of search and knowledge. Maybe it will be more human that us because >everyone knows humans shouldn't use a search, only stupid programs do >this. > >- Don I think, if knowledge is elegant or not depends on how you create and apply it. The amount of memory it takes is not the point. If I knew a way to automatically create a highly sophisticated evaluation function and searching rules from playing games and from analysing games from databases I would consider it very elegant even if the resulting program code would take a gigabyte of memory. But the time consuming trial and error techniques we use are definitly ugly. Temporal differences to set the weights is interesting, but the patterns and rules still have to be done manually. But even if we would succeed in automating knowledge generation, what humans do when playing chess is something completely different. On computers we have algorithms and data (OOP doesn't really make a difference). For brains algorithms and data are the same thing. When humans play chess they are not simply executing a program and using what they have learned, but will have new insights during they play - they think ! To express it in computer terms, humans change/enhance their program during that program is executed ! Flexibility makes the difference. What Kasparov knows about chess can't be downloaded into a computer as a whole, that's what I'm completely convinced of. - Guido
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