Author: Roberto Nerici
Date: 03:02:10 02/17/04
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>why should a computer emulate the human approach to chess? not everything in >nature is perfect... are our aeroplanes equipped with big feathery flapping >wings? if we find a better solution, we should use it. chess computers can do >many things the best human players are quite uncapable of, and sacrificing this >kind of power seems wrong to me (and you would be sacrificing it if you wanted >to build in sophisticated pattern recognition in a program, slowing it down by >many powers of 10...). I agree with the analogy but remember that there is more than one possible goal being aimed for when writing a chess program. Sticking with your feathery analogy, it would be very interesting to build a robot with flappy wings and feathers and no doubt you would learn a lot. In that sense, it would be "worth" doing. What it wouldn't be, is a good way to build a machine for flying around doing something useful. Similarly with the chess engine. I'm skeptical that Symbolic will ever be a very strong engine, so if his only goal is to write a strong engine, I think he's going about it the wrong way. However, he's said that that isn't the case and he may well achieve his other goals; it is (to me at least) an interesting project, and if he can produce a reasonable program which can describe its plans that it be a good tool for many people. However, I do agree with your argument about the weakness of emulating human play so it is worth expanding on it. I think (as you seem to) it is a false assumption that to play chess well you must play it as humans do. I think this was obvious 20+ years ago; now it is blindingly obvious :-) Chess is an interesting human game because humans find it difficult. Humans are basically bad at chess; it isn't something human brains are particularly suited for. Making one type of hardware stuggle to behave like a very different type of hardware struggling to do a task it is unsuited for is, well, we can't expect it to be very good at it. You have to do it for reasons other than pure strength. Roberto/.
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