Author: Otello Gnaramori
Date: 05:32:20 08/21/02
...and a link with computer chess. First of all a report found in : http://chess.about.com/library/weekly/aa090299.htm "8 Year Old Defeats Grandmaster One of Britain's leading grandmasters was defeated by an eight year-old child at the 3rd Mind Sports Olympiad earlier this week. John Nunn, one of the U.K's top players, lost a five-minute "blitz" game to David Howell, who is now the youngest person ever to beat a grandmaster. The Mind Sports Olympiad, hosted by the Times of London, features competition in a wide range of thinking games such as chess, bridge, and cryptic crosswords. Howell's win over Nunn is not a one-time fluke. Several weeks earlier he beat British women's champion Harriet Hunt in another fast time-control game. Whether Howell will fulfill his early promise and mature into a great adult player -- like other child prodigies such as Bobby Fischer and Sammy Reshevsky -- remains to be seen. However, early indications are that Howell will become one of the top players of his generation" Follows the game (see http link). Then some thoughts found here by Steve Howell : http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternsInChess There are two basic processes in chess. "Searching" is where you literally play out the game scenarios in your mind (if I move here, he moves there, etc.) A basic min-max searching algorithm is pretty powerful even with a lousy HeuriStic, and you can fine-tune it with alpha-beta pruning, and I'm sure there are even better searching algorithms that my late-1980's intro AI class never covered. :) I would suppose that many young chess prodigies beat more experienced players by being more agile and accurate in their mental searches for good moves. The other process is "evaluation." A master can look at the configuration of a board and determine, for example, that the knight in the corner is more dangerous than the bishop behind the pawn, even if no immediate threats are visible from the pieces. The master can immediately fit the layout of a board into a context of some familiar pattern that he's already seen before. His ability to evaluate the balance of power allows him to be more efficient in his searching. (follows a little digression on DB) Now, DB took a while to reach its world title. Certainly, improvements were made to its hardware, so that searching was more efficient. Hardware improvements include both general processor speedups and customization of circuitry to optimize calculations of particular heuristics. (...) -- SteveHowell Opinions are welcome. w.b.r. Otello
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