Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 09:17:02 12/26/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 26, 2001 at 08:10:41, Otello Gnaramori wrote:
>On December 26, 2001 at 05:41:07, Andre Godat wrote:
>
>> The other day, on a different thread, somebody posted a message in which he
>>stated that, for all he knows, there may be a "retard" somewhere who can play
>>chess better than Kasparov. It is obvious to me that there's a gigantic
>>dividing line between a memory savant like "Rain Man", who can memorize every
>>game database in existence and still contribute nothing to the game and a genius
>>who can can add his own original touch and take the game to its highest level
>>ever.
>> If I pretend that Fritz is a real person--and I do it every day--there is no
>>question that he's an idiot-savant. In analysis mode, he just calculates until
>>I tell him to stop. He doesn't care about money or women or even chess itself;
>>the game is, for him, just a math problem he's trying to solve. But humans
>>don't look at a billion positions and say, "Well, this line is +1.41 and that
>>line is +1.51, so I'll go with the latter." It simply isn't possible, but that
>>may be what "Rain Man" would try to do.
>> Even in chess, Fritz can be amazingly idiotic. He has no intuition or
>>strategic sense. He has thousands of opening moves in his book, but he doesn't
>>really KNOW any openings in the sense of having an understanding of the typical
>>middlegames resulting from those openings. Yet his very ignorance is a source
>>of some remarkable novelties. He doesn't "know" that Black is supposed to
>>attack on the kingside in the Dutch Defense, so if he sees something on the
>>queenside that he likes, he'll play there.
>
>One of the things to come out of the effort to build chess programs is that
>games like chess require very little "intelligence".
Yes and no.
1) once some piece of "intelligence" has been identified and included into a
chess program in the form of an evaluation factor or an algorithm, we just stop
considering this as "intelligence". So "intelligence" is like horizon: you
believe you have made a step toward it, but realize it is still as far as
before. Our definition of intelligence is not only fuzzy, it changes constantly
as we are making progress in IT. Computer Chess is probably one of the main
contribution in our change of mind about what "intelligence" is.
2) the kind of intelligence that is missing in today's programs (and I regret
very much that people starting to work in chess to not try to work on this) is
the ability to extract knowledge by itself and re-use it later. If chess
programs were doing this, you would not say that chess requires very little
intelligence. But you know that they don't, so you feel safe saying that chess
requires no intelligence. I still believe that chess requires intelligence for a
human player. In other words, without intelligence human players could not
become as strong as they are at chess.
1 and 2 is the reason why I believe that today's chess programs are a dead end.
They represent a high level of technology, but this technology leads to nothing
else than strong chess.
Christophe
>This isn't that surprising, actually : most very good chess players are quite
>intelligent, but some are not, and some are basically idiot-savants (like
>Fritz); conversely, many very intelligent people are lousy chess players.
>
>Chess is a specific skill that requires very select bits of intelligence, it's
>no more a guide to overall intelligence than the ability to factor large
>numbers.
>
>w.b.r.
>Otello
>
>
>> One final point: When the day comes that a computer program is invincible
>>(we'll call this creature Fritz 17) it may be that it still won't be superior to
>>a Super-GM using today's best software as a blunder checker only. The strongest
>>player possible today is the best program, running on the fastest processor, and
>>assisted by a very strong GM who makes up for its horizon-based idiocy. It may
>>be that no stronger player is possible. It may be that a Kasparov-caliber human
>>could take today's technology and never lose a correspondence game to anyone or
>>anything. Maybe God will share his 32-man tablebase with me and let me know the
>>ultimate truth about the game.
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