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Subject: Re: But Not Yet As Good As Deep Blue '97

Author: stuart taylor

Date: 16:10:26 07/17/00

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On July 17, 2000 at 11:23:52, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 17, 2000 at 09:44:57, stuart taylor wrote:
>
>>On July 17, 2000 at 09:32:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 17, 2000 at 08:05:57, blass uri wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 17, 2000 at 07:22:41, Graham Laight wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I'm afraid I still feel that Junior could have come out ahead (instead of
>>>>>level)in this tournament by beating Bareev and Khalifman - and possibly by not
>>>>>losing with such apparent ease to Kramnik. Continuing the game against Anand
>>>>>might possibly have gained an extra half point as well.
>>>>>
>>>>>I think that Amir has an aspiration to make his program demonstably better than
>>>>>Deep Blue (this certainly comes across in his interviews published on the
>>>>>Chessbase Website coverage of Dortmund (www.chessbase.com) before the Kramnik
>>>>>game). If so, as a (hopefully!) impartial member of the viewing public, I'm
>>>>>afraid to say that I've yet to be convinced.
>>>>>
>>>>>As evidence, I point firstly to the games against Bareev and Khalifman. On both
>>>>>occasions when Deep Blue '97 gained an advantage over Gary Kasparov (who's a
>>>>>better player than anyone at Dortmund was), it parlayed that advantage into
>>>>>victory - whilst Deep Junior twice failed conspicuously to "slam in the lamb".
>>>>>
>>>>>I would also point to the game against Khalifman. Here we see Deep Junior lose
>>>>>to a combination of blocked centre and king attack - classic anti computer
>>>>>methods which have both been well known for a long time. They work because, in
>>>>>this case, nothing short of truly massive search depth is going to help you to
>>>>>make the correct moves.
>>>>>
>>>>>However, for both king attack and blocked centre, Deep Blue '97 demonstrated
>>>>>that it's evaluation knowledge was able to adequately handle the challenge.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>I guess that the evaluation of Deep Junior could do better if Deep Junior could
>>>>search the same number of nodes.
>>>>
>>>>I believe that Deep Junior is better than Deeper blue if you assume 200,000,000
>>>>nodes per second for deep Junior.
>>>>
>>>>Uri
>>>
>>>
>>>I believe pigs can fly.  But only if you increase the density of the atmosphere
>>>by a factor of 10,000 or so.
>>>
>>>DB has two almost insurmountable advantages:  (1) it is faster than anything is
>>>going to be for a _long_ time;  (2) using special-purpose hardware they did
>>>everything in the eval that was suggested by GM players, because they could do
>>>so with no speed penalty.  DJ and every other PC program has _many_
>>>"concessions" in the evaluation due to speed considerations.  DJ's king safety
>>>would fail if it was 1,000 times faster... because there are some things that
>>>speed won't help until we reach the point where the computer can see 30-50 plies
>>>into the future.  You either understand the Stonewall (and its kin) or you get
>>>beat by it, regardless of how deep you can see.  I don't claim to have solved
>>>this either, but I don't see Crafty losing Stonewall games on ICC today, where
>>>3 years ago it was getting killed by this attack, and my defense was to hack the
>>>book repeatedly.  It will certainly lose one every now and then as my randomness
>>>(on ICC) will occasionally cause it to play a stonewall as black.  But book
>>>learning closes that hole, and once out of book, it doesn't have great
>>>difficulty avoiding the problem pretty well.
>>>
>>>There are a couple of ICC "regulars" that are a problem for computers,
>>>cptnbluebear is one, and insight is another.  cptnbluebear doesn't play crafty
>>>much any more because other programs are easier to 'stonewall'.  Insight still
>>>plays a lot, but he _rarely_ wins.  He seems to primarily play for draws, which
>>>are easier to do, but still very difficult to pull off.
>>>
>>>I've done this with special eval code, not with speed... and I have a long way
>>>to go myself...
>>
>>To Dr. Hyatt, So how far do you beleive it is possible to go without tremendous
>>speed?  If software was maximised the most possible, could 1ghz. ever overtake
>>D.B.? or maybe 2 ghz?   What is the potential that still hasn't been realised?
>>S.Taylor
>
>
>this is an old theoretical question.  A similar one:  what is the maximum
>bandwidth over a single piece of copper?  Answer?  1 / signal-to-noise-ratio.
>If you get SN to 0.00, the bandwidth is infinite.  But that is quite hard to
>do of course.  :)
>
>same thing for chess engines.  In theory, today's hardware ought to be fast
>enough.  But the programming is hundreds of years behind what evolution has done
>to our "personal biological computer system" we all carry around.  It will catch
>up at some point of course.
>
>As far as overtaking DB, that is another matter.  Whatever commodity micro-
>processors can do, DB (or a new successor) can do 1,000 times faster, easily.
>So the hardware we use won't _ever_ be as good as the special purpose hardware
>that can be designed/built to handle a specific thing like chess.
>
>The current DB is going to be untouchable for at least another 5 years, maybe
>closer to 10.  By then Hsu _could_ do something that would again be untouchable
>for another 5-10 years.  The special-purpose vs general-purpose issue won't go
>away, ever, most likely.

Atleast you seem to be conceding that PC software MIGHT overtake the latest
version of DB, due to better computing. I mean, it might start catching up a
little bit with our "personal biological computerized system", enough, even
before another 5 years.
S.Taylor



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