Author: Graham Laight
Date: 02:47:21 10/18/00
Go up one level in this thread
It's a shame this post was in response to the wrong thread. To save people having to jump between threads, I've reproduced the plan at the end of this post. On October 17, 2000 at 13:46:02, Bruce Moreland wrote: >Your proposal is the same sort of nonsense that you've been promoting for the >past several years, and I'll give you the same sort of response I've given you >for the past several years. You make it sound like you're an expert! :) >Some of the steps toward your solution are important enough that if those steps >could be completed, chess wouldn't be anywhere near the most interesting problem >to use those tools on. Your "practical" plan calls for enormous work and >several major breakthroughs in AI. Where? Why? It's all very well to make sweeping generalisations, but the discussion would be SO much more meaningful if only we knew what these generalisations referred to. >Several of your steps are described in a few sentences, but the amount of work >involved to solve then would be national in scale, if they are solvable by >humans at all in a practical time-frame. Like the brilliant, well planned, well funded scientific project to evolve humans from chimpanzees, for example? >And tying together these monumental tasks is a plan that could have been devised >by any vaguely technical person during their first few moments of thought about >the problem. The plan is a first draft - it's not meant to be the finished design. Any suggestions for refinements in the plan cordially welcomed. At the start of the plan, the first line says it's a first draft. >bruce This post reminds me - you still owe me a beer, by the way! Copy of the plan: The purpose of this is to build a program that can teach itself to do a good job of evaluating chess positions, using only technology that is available today, and can be applied on a PC which can be bought off the shelf today. Steps to building a self learning chess machine - 1st draft: * assemble a collection of evaluation components. There should be sufficient eval components to be able to theoretically evaluate any position, if combined correctly * set up a genetic algortithm to be able to combine these components into a single evaluation function, and to be able to vary them from game to game * write a program that can "categorise" chess positions, and come up with a measure of "similarity" between them * assemble a collection of categorisation components * set up a genetic algorithm to to be able to combine these components into a single categorisation function, and to be able to vary them from game to game * new categories and evaluation functions can be made by combining components from existing evaluation functions (chosen for their "similarity"), when the "similarity" between the new position and existing categories is sufficiently small * seed the system with some categories * seed the system with a categorisation function that works * seed the system with working eval functions suited to the categories * ensure the system is clever enough to get to check-mate from the 1st game of the experiment * start the system playing against another copy of itself * During the game, every legal move will be evaluated (1 ply) and the best one chosen * when the system loses a game, it must evolve. From the move list, the evaluation function used prior to the eval score falling will be subjected to the genetic algorithm, as will the categorisation There is a problem in computer chess that the problem may have occured before the evaluation started to fall. In this system, the problem will be solved because, with sufficient play, the poor evaluation will eventually make its way back to the source of the problem (though other eval functions will temporarily be messed up on the way!). It took roughly 400,000 generations to change chimpanzees into humans (based on average generation of 15 years - a number I admit I've plucked out of the air, but which is at least the right order of magnitude). Could 400,000 generations of the above system produce a great chess player? Comments please! -g
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