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Subject: Re: Fascinating Software Tools Idea!

Author: Bob Durrett

Date: 07:36:36 11/20/02

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On November 20, 2002 at 04:29:36, jefkaan wrote:

>On November 19, 2002 at 19:18:56, Bob Durrett wrote:
>
>>There are "tons" of complicated items of human knowledge.  Much is captured in
>>large databases of master games.
>>
>now you are going back to chess; ok, so the question is,
>how complicated is the game of chess; obviously its a lot
>more complicated than tictactoe, or even checkers or so.
>
>On the other hand, it's not as complicated as for example
>the works of Shakespeare; you can store Hamlet in bits and
>bytes on whatever computer, but there is no computer program
>which can understand the play.
>
>The same still holds for storing GM games up to a certain extent;
>certain patterns, eg. a fortress are easy to see for a GM,
>but not at all by a computer program.
>So what i meant was that we need software 'tools' at
>a higher level of abstraction. Maybe in some hierarchical
>way, informationwise, i mean. There are a lot
>of simple tools in computer chess, see eg. the
>tools of Paul Onstadt (seems to have deceased).
>
>More complicated tools are Chessbase and Chess Assistant.
>You can search for certain patterns in such programs
>(probably Chessbase is better in that, but for
>the opening book theory i prefer CA); now the
>question is, how the program an engine which
>can look forward into certain patterns, simple
>example, recognizing the difference and importance
>between equal and unequal bishop pairs in the
>middlegame, depending on other game characteristics.
>
>Vincent could tell you a lot about that, but he doesn't :)
>However you can also read about chess theory. Eg. modern
>chess strategy by J.Watson. Now such ideas are difficult to
>absorb in the first place (it takes learning, practising
>to see what's most important, etc.); a team of GM consultants
>in theory could help maybe, although digesting the best
>ideas from their different styles might be difficult,
>but then still such ideas are even harder to program
>in assembler, C_sharp, bitboards, or whatever.
>
>In fact, we would need higher level programming languages
>for such purposes; that's what i was meaning.

Yes, that is interesting.

Would you care to elaborate about that higher level programming language?

What would be some specific things that language would do [beyond what you said
already]?

Would the compiler for that language produce machine instructions, or some
intermediate product?

Bob D.





>For a relatively simple game as chess building an expert
>system might turn out 'easy', after 30 yrs or so, when
>99.9999% of the games will end up as a draw; for Go, it's
>already a lot more difficult as a result of a/o pattern
>recognition and strategy; i suspect such issues are
>the underlying reason for the different views of
>Vincent D. and mr Hyatt.
>
>Only when programmers will be able to make a program which
>can translate Ulysses by James Joyce from English to Chinese
>they also will be able to beat the best human Go players.
>This imho will take a lot of time, decades to beat the
>best Go players, and hundreds of years to translate literature.
>Making a selfconcious computer, which can learn by itself,
>like some sort of SF 'android' will take even longer;
>at least thousands of years or so i presume (but i'm always
>willing to bet about this for a couple of beers, you know :)
>best regards,
>jef



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