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Subject: Re: Aberden University plans supercomputer to beat "greatest grandmasters"

Author: Landon Rabern

Date: 09:47:35 06/05/01

Go up one level in this thread


On June 05, 2001 at 04:27:31, Graham Laight wrote:

>On June 04, 2001 at 19:00:55, Landon Rabern wrote:
>
>>On June 04, 2001 at 18:48:40, Marc van Hal wrote:
>>
>>>On June 04, 2001 at 17:44:56, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>>
>>>>On June 04, 2001 at 16:03:36, John Hatcher wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Here is a news report today from Reuters which may be of interest:
>>>>>
>>>>>**********************************************************
>>>>>
>>>>>(Reuters)
>>>>>
>>>>>Scottish University Sets Up First Chess Doctorate
>>>>>
>>>>>EDINBURGH, Scotland (Reuters) - A Scottish university is setting up the world's
>>>>>first chess doctorate which its creator hopes will lead to the development of
>>>>>supercomputers capable of beating even the greatest of grandmasters.
>>>>>
>>>>>``My computers will be as clever as 1,000 Einsteins,'' course director Peter
>>>>>Vas, professor of artificial intelligence at Scotland's Aberdeen University,
>>>>>told Reuters Monday.
>>>>>
>>>>>A keen chess player himself, Vas is looking for around 40 graduates for the
>>>>>three-year PhD course, which also aims to push back the boundaries of artificial
>>>>>intelligence, creating computers that can think and learn by themselves.
>>>>>
>>>>>He hopes former Russian world chess champion Garry Kasparov will become a
>>>>>lecturer.
>>>>>
>>>>>Only the brainiest need bother applying -- prospective candidates must be highly
>>>>>proficient at math and computing and be in the top flight of their national
>>>>>chess rankings.
>>>>>
>>>>>``There will be a grandmaster entrance exam,'' Vas said, although he denied
>>>>>reports that they had to beat the grandmaster in a game to get in.
>>>>>
>>>>>``Obviously we can't ask for them to beat a grandmaster because if it was
>>>>>Kasparov playing 100 people simultaneously, he would still beat them all,'' Vas
>>>>>said. ``Just showing the potential will be enough.''
>>>>>
>>>>>Vas said the new supercomputers would have the combined intelligence of the
>>>>>world's finest human minds.
>>>>>
>>>>>However, they would not live up to the apocalyptic fantasies of some Hollywood
>>>>>film directors and get so smart they tried to destroy humanity.
>>>>>
>>>>>``An intelligent thing will always stop short of destroying itself,'' Vas said.
>>>>>``There's no chance of that happening.''
>>>>>
>>>>>Even Kasparov, who has met tough electronic challengers in IBM's 'Deep Blue' and
>>>>>its bigger, better cousin 'Deeper Blue', stands to gain.
>>>>>
>>>>>``Playing something better than him will help him improve his game,'' Vas said.
>>>>>*******************
>>>>>END
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>The tone and the content sound like an April 1st joke.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>"Only the brainiest need bother applying -- prospective candidates must be
>>>>highly proficient at math and computing and be in the top flight of their
>>>>national chess rankings."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>What a major mistake. Strong chess players are not the people of choice to
>>>>create a strong chess computer.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>    Christophe
>>>
>>>
>>>Well then this is where your wrong human chess players are the only beings who
>>>are capabale to see the positional  moves better then the programs of today will
>>>And i do not think that keeping the same course of programing ever will be able
>>>to see the positional moves (a combining with neural networks shall be an
>>>extremely improvement for positional moves and planning
>>>Today many people still think that every opening is just playable I already
>>>showed many times that this is not the case
>>>Even many openingsbooks from programs contain these mistakes
>>>Then again I have seen programs of today ruin winning positions
>>>and even where glad to draw that winning position.
>>>
>>>
>>>For the matter tactical moves are moves wich capture a piece,threaten to capture
>>>a piece giving check ,threaten to give check mate,threaten to give mate.
>>>giving pat threaten to give pat
>>>
>>>positional moves are moves wich are the moves when there is nothing to do and
>>>enable a tactical move (Tarrasch).
>>
>>I have done some testing will a neural network evaluation in my program for my
>>independent study.  The biggest problem I ran into was the slowness of
>>calculating all the sigmoids(I actually used tanh(NET)).  It drastically cuts
>>down the nps and gets spanked by my handcrafted eval.  I got moderate results
>>playing with set ply depths no set time controls, but that isn't saying much.
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Landon W. Rabern
>
>It is my personal experience (outside of chess) that when you have what looks
>like an insoluble intelligence problem, you can effectively attack it by
>combining different AI tools, rather than relying on a single one.
>
>For example, in chess, you might use CBR as the over-arching method, NNs to
>classify positions, GAs to create evaluation functions within classifications
>etc.
>
>-g

I was not relying on a single AI tool, it was a NN eval function on top of a
mini-max search.  I have had some experience with GA's as well and the
conclusion I have come to(which fits with many people in the field) is that they
don't work well on all but the simplest toy problems.

Regards,

Landon W. Rabern




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