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Subject: Re: Computer Chess Programs & Intelligence

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 09:56:58 03/14/01

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On March 14, 2001 at 05:25:37, Andrew Dados wrote:

>I doubt chess domain is wide enough for 'generalization' here. If a program
>could learn Thai chess in 5 min as all chess-playing humans do I would attribute
>it some 'intelligence'.

I disagree -- I think it is wide enough.  As I said, people spend tremendous
time mastering chess and still find more to learn.  That's big enough.  I agree
that a program that can handle more than one game without special purpose code
(no fair making a program that essentially has two modules) exhibits more
intelligence than one that can only play one game, but I think it's still good
enough.  Fifty years ago it was certainly good enough.

Please don't think that I argue that the exhibition of intelligence by a program
means that I argue that the program is human or even fractionally so.  The
ability to exhibit intelligent behavior is very complex in humans, and I don't
think it's necessary for a computer to superset a human before its behavior can
be labelled intelligent.  Otherwise the issue may be whether we can say that the
program is human.

This may be part of the problem.  Humans associate intelligence with humanity,
and they are very jealous of their humanity.

I don't think that saying that a program solves a problem in intelligent fashion
is a threat to humans.

>For now traversing Shannon tree with huge speeds and evaluation function
>'correct' in 99,96% or so I call 'good craftsmanship'.

It takes a hard problem, one that provides humans with decades of challenge, a
problem that is spoken of in the same breath with art and music, and handles it
with sufficient skill that humans must take note.

The AI field picked chess as hard solvable case that it could learn from.  It
turns out that you can do chess pretty well without inventing something that
will win you a Nobel prize.

That doesn't diminish the problem.  That alpha-beta plus primitive eval can
perform so well is actually very interesting.

I think the fact that an intelligent program can be created by a high school kid
in a few weeks is fascinating.

bruce

>
>-Andrew-



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