Author: Shep
Date: 06:50:32 01/24/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 21, 2000 at 20:41:27, Dann Corbit wrote:
>On January 21, 2000 at 19:28:38, walter irvin wrote:
>
>>which is more important ?????? is it posible that a program written on a 286
>>25mhz 4mg ram could be stronger than deep blue ????? is it posible that a
>>program like sargon ran on a machine that produced 2,000,000,000,000,000 nps
>>could reach 2900 elo ?? perhaps there are great untried methods that will
>>produce major elo jumps ????
>
>My 286 program would look like this:
>
>#include <stdio.h>
>#include <stdlib.h>
>static char str[4096];
>main()
>{
> char *err;
>getmove:
> puts("Tell me, Kasparov, what move should I make?");
> err = fgets(str, sizeof str, stdin);
> if (err == 0) goto getmove;
> if (strcmp(str, "quit\n") == 0) exit(0);
> printf("I choose: %s", str);
> goto getmove;
>
> return 0;
>}
>
>But it needs a special operator to be effective (His name is in the code).
>
>Actually, you raise a good question, which is this:
>Is chess O(exp(n))? {where n is the depth in plies}
>
>If we could discover an algorithm linear in n [stop laughing all you chess
>programmers] then a 286 could pound the stuffings out of Deep Blue.
>
>Conversely, can it be proven that the search in chess cannot be made in
>polynomial time as a function of plies of lookahead? How about a subset search
>that produces "good enough" answers?
>
>In other words, a fundamentally better algorithm for searching chess positions
>could render all chess programs obsolete. Don't hold your breath, though. A
>lot of smart people have been looking and nobody has found one yet.
Still that doesn't mean it's going to be a matter of centuries like Fermat's
Theorem. There are several important problems in computer science for which the
answer is surprisingly simple (at least in relation to the effort put into it).
I remember the famous "LBA problem" which was unsolved for a decade or so, was
found by a Czech student (and independently, an American prof), and the proof is
about 1.5 pages in a pocket-size book; and many computer science students can
understand it (though they wouldn't be able to find it themselves).
Bottom line is, there might be some rather simple "new method" that can advance
computer chess by 100 or 200 ELO.
OTOH, it may just as well be a "P=NP" problem... :)
---
Shep
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