Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 23:40:21 03/14/01
Go up one level in this thread
On March 14, 2001 at 21:12:55, Vincent Vega wrote: >On March 14, 2001 at 03:20:07, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >>On March 13, 2001 at 19:06:27, HECTOR MUNOZ wrote: >> >>>There are some who might argue that a computer chess program is not a >>>demonstration of intelligence in particular, a program which uses Shannon's >>>Type A Approach. I need to present a solid argument that such a program >>>does involve intelligence. >> >>Everyone tries to answer this question without figuring out what they mean by >>"intelligence" first. >> >>The OED definition takes the better part of a page, and gives various usages >>dating back to 1390, although some aspects of the word are extremely new. In >>particular, the use of the term "intelligence quotient" is said to date back >>only to 1921, as expressed in English. That's the part of the definition that >>gets everyone tied up in knots these days. >> >>The first definition is "[t]he faculty of understanding; intellect." The second >>one is "[u]nderstanding as a quality of admitting of degree; spec. superior >>understanding; quickness of mental apprehension, sagacity." The others don't >>seem to apply much. >> >>I don't think the dictionary is very helpful here. This word seems too large >>for the dictionary. Perhaps someone has written a book or an article that gets >>to the point, but failing that, I'll take a crack at it, as it relates to >>computer programs. > >Well, most posts so far have made a direct or indirect mention of the fact that >"intelligence" is a very hard concept to define. The discussion about the >difference between intelligence and IQ, etc., has been played out over and over >hundreds of times on the Net so I don't find it too interesting to go into these >general cases again. Defining chess-specific intelligence is much more >interesting though. > >> >>I believe that intelligence is displayed if a program can generalize effectively >>within a sufficiently complex problem domain. It's not enough to be able to >>handle specific cases, it must be possible to be effective in a wide variety of >>cases, via the use of general-purpose code. >> >>Chess, a game that has fascinated humans for hundreds of years in its current >>form, and much longer if we allow for precursor forms, seems like it would >>qualify as a sufficiently difficult domain. Humans devote their lives to the >>game and the game remains fresh and challenging. > >I disagree. Chess is an extremely limited problem domain. The fact that it is >interesting and difficult for humans doesn't make it any less limited. >Successful chess approaches have not been successful in other turn-based, >full-information, finite games like Go, not to even mention less similar >problems. Full-board alpha-beta is not going to work with Go, and programmers haven't come up with a replacement that gets them to where we've gotten with chess, but that doesn't detract from chess as much as people want to say it does. So what if Go is harder to do? >>I believe that the current programs generalize very well. They can play >>essentially any position. > >I disagree. They barely generalize at all. Generalization is inferring rules >from particular cases. Most programs do it rarely, if at all, instead the >programmer or his references do it and the program simply uses these ready-made >rules. They generalize across the entire domain of chess. I'm not talking about what the eval function does, I'm talking about what the program does. The programs play quite well in positions that weren't anticipated by anybody. That's a lot of positions. >>There are some that cause them problems, but there >>are a great many that they play well enough to challenge a strong human when the >>human plays against the program, and they can be used even by very strong humans >>in order to provide insight in very difficult positions. These positions are >>rarely foreseen by the program's author, but the program is still very >>effective. > >This is not an example of the ability to generalize. I don't think you can >argue that these insights are caused by any generalization ability. Instead, I >think that other abilities like quickly and accurately classifying positions, >having great memory capacity and calculation speed, or having access to large >databases of ready-made solutions make their insights useful. People have latched on to the endgame database notion as a means of accusing the programs of being cheap. You could delete the endgame databases and there would be no significant change in play until there are few pieces left, and even then the programs would do okay without endgame databases. Endgame databases are a means of getting a little bit more performance out of something that is already good. A program could play alright without an opening book, but these are added as a cheap way of adding randomness and improving strength cheaply. During the middlegame, the programs are creating strength from search and a pretty limited evaluation function. It works surprisingly well and there aren't many special cases coded in, mostly just notions of material, space, and structural issues. >>I think that intelligence is essentially the ability to effectively handle >>difficult specific cases with general-purpose methods, and the chess domain, >>while very specific, is rich enough that it requires the ability to generalize >>in order to tackle the wide variety of practical cases a program is apt to face. > >Handling special cases with general-purpose methods is not generalization. >Creating these methods is and few programs do it. Even if they were able to do >it well, I still wouldn't call them "intelligent" because I find chess to be way >too limited of a domain. I don't think that the all of the less complex games are boring, and I don't think that a game program is boring unless it's a million lines long. Humans play more complex games than chess, but there are obviously theoretical games beyond those which are much more complex. I don't think this fact diminishes the games like Go and Shogi, anymore than the existence of Go and Shogi diminish chess. Chess was until recently a game that was considered to be too difficult for computers to play well. That this has been proven false is a great achievement. bruce
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.