Author: Rolf Tueschen
Date: 15:55:09 01/12/03
Ray Kurzweil - Deep Blue vs. Deep Fritz http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0527.html?printable=1 Extracts: (chosen by me) The Deep Fritz computer chess software only achieved a draw in its recent chess tournament with Vladimir Kramnik because it has available only about 1.3% as much brute force computation as the earlier Deep Blue's specialized hardware. Despite that, it plays chess at about the same level because of its superior pattern recognition-based pruning algorithm. In six years, a program like Deep Fritz will again achieve Deep Blue's ability to analyze 200 million board positions per second. Now with yesterday's final game, we have the current reigning computer program, Deep Fritz, able only to achieve a 4-4 tournament tie with world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. It has been five years since Deep Blue's victory, so what are we to make of this situation? Computer hardware has nonetheless continued its exponential increase in speed. Personal computer speeds have doubled every year since 1997. Thus the general-purpose Pentium processors used by Deep Fritz are about 32 times faster than personal computer processors back in 1997. Deep Fritz uses a network of only eight personal computers, so the hardware is equivalent to 256 1997-class personal computers. Compare that to Deep Blue, which used 256 specialized chess processors, each of which were about 100 times faster than 1997 personal computers (of course, only for computing chess minimax). So Deep Blue was 25,600 times faster than a 1997-class personal computer for computing chess moves, and 100 times faster than Deep Fritz. This analysis is confirmed by the reported speeds of the two systems: Deep Blue can analyze 200 million board positions per second compared to only about 2.5 million for Deep Fritz. Thus the primary problem with Deep Fritz is that it is much slower than Deep Blue. However, the reason for this is the use of specialized hardware in Deep Blue, and the lack of it in Deep Fritz. This reflects the relatively low priority we've given to chess machines since 1997. The focus of research in the various domains spun out of artificial intelligence has been placed instead on problems of greater consequence, such as guiding airplanes, missiles, and factory robots, understanding natural language, diagnosing electrocardiograms and blood cell images, detecting credit card fraud, and a myriad of other successful "narrow" AI applications. In The Age of Intelligent Machines, I estimated that it would take about 40 billion years to make one move if we failed to prune the move-countermove tree and attempted to make a "perfect" move in a typical game (assuming about 30 moves in a typical game and about eight possible moves per play, we have 830 possible move sequences; analyzing one billion of these per second would take 1018 seconds or 40 billion years). I noted that this would not be regulation play, so a practical system needs to continually prune away unpromising lines of play. This requires insight and is essentially a pattern-recognition judgment. Humans, even world class chess masters, perform the minimax algorithm extremely slowly, generally performing less than one move-countermove analysis per second. So how is it that a chess master can compete at all with computer systems that do this millions of times faster? The answer is that we possess formidable powers of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition incidentally is my principal area of technical interest and expertise, and is, in my view, the primary basis of human intelligence. Thus we perform the task of pruning the tree with great insight. The ability of humans to perform well in chess is clearly not due to our calculating prowess, which we are in fact rather poor at. We use instead a quintessentially human form of judgment. For this type of qualitative judgment, Deep Fritz represents genuine progress over earlier systems. Incidentally, humans have made no progress in the last five years, with the top human scores remaining just below 2,800. Kasparov is rated at 2,795 and Kramnik at 2,794. ======================================================= My critic of Kurzweil: As in the question of cloning where Ray Kurzweil said that we were talking about "meat or tissue [my translation]" and NOT about "babies", he is completely wrong with his statements about chess, computer chess and rating points. Look at this, Kurzweil is taking the results of such a commercial show event as a factual truth, so he argues that FRITZ did "only" get a draw against Kramnik "because" of his 1,3% ... etc. This is sort of crap. It's completely illogical argumentation. Because the result has no meaning at all. It all depended of Kramnik's pay and his attitude and ethics. The first games have shown that Fritz has no original capacity to beat or even play in sound chess play. And the final statement is also absolute nonsense. Kurzweil is arguing that humans did not make progress in the last five years BECAUSE their top scorers are still at 2800. Just try to imagine why it is nonsense. The answer is simply because the Elo numbers have no direct connect to absolute strength! And also it's clear that machines Elo is not at all human Elo. Regards, Rolf Tueschen (Excuse me for the earlier posting into CTF, it was an oversight after I returned from the text program.)
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