Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 20:41:33 04/17/02
As I was driving home today I noticed how most people were within reasonable proximity of the speed limit. I suppose the reason is because if the drivers went too far over the speed limit a police officer might pull him or her over and give them a ticket. So as has become my natural thought process, I thought, "what would a computer chess program do in this situation?" My conclusion was that if a computer chess program was driving a car it would go as fast as possible, knocking others off the road, causing wrecks everywhere, and not concerned about police at all, only concerned with minimizing it's travel time. My reasoning was that computer chess programs take lots of shortcuts and sometimes those shortcuts don't work, but the advantage gained from the majority of the time that the shortcuts do work makes the overall gain a positive one. For example, the transposition table. A vast majority of the time you can get away with using hashes, but eventually you get a collision. But you don't get caught for such a large majority of the time that it's well worth it. Similarly, a computer chess program driving a car would not get caught a good majority of the time because how often do you drive somewhere without seeing a police car? Like the transposition table, the computer chess program would get caught speeding occasionally, but overall it would save great amounts of time in travelling. Null move is another such example. Null move gives great speedups in the vast majority of positions, but there are those few where null move will cost you the game. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? What effect do computer chess programs have on the morals of the world? Surely it is not desirable for everyone to drive as fast as they wish, cutting their travel times in half at the cost of killing a few people on the way home. What does this say about competition in general? To me it says that a computer chess program would be an evil being if it were allowed to do anything but play chess. Imagine a being that calculated every possibility and did anything and everything it could to get ahead in the world, at any cost. Before long the program would add to it's repertiore killing, stealing, lying, etc., anything to get what it wants. That doesn't sound very desirable to me. Good thing the beasts can only play chess :) Russell
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.