Author: Tony Werten
Date: 08:02:58 06/11/03
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On June 10, 2003 at 19:19:41, Omid David Tabibi wrote: >On June 09, 2003 at 04:01:12, Walter Faxon wrote: > >>Musings on nonstandard computer chess techniques. >> >>What's new on the computer chess front? I note that Sergei S. Markoff's new >>program SmarThink (http://www.aigroup.narod.ru/detailse.htm) is supposed to use >>(among many other things) some of former world chess champion M.M. Botvinnik's >>ideas. Botvinnik's "Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning" (Springer, 1970) >>and "Chess: Solving Inexact Search Problems" (Springer, 1983) described a method >>that apparently only Botvinnik's programmer/protege Boris Stilman believed would >>work, which Stilman later generalized in his own book "Linguistic Geometry: From >>Search to Construction" (Kluwer, 2000). Markoff's own on-line writings on chess >>algorithms (http://www.aigroup.narod.ru/indexe.htm) are only in Russian, so far. >> (I am assuming that the SmarThink download doesn't include source.) >> >>Markoff also writes that his first program included ideas from the authors of >>"Kaissa". Those authors published papers in the 1970's on "the method of >>analogies" to reduce search work, but they did not use it in their competitive >>program. If you recall, Hsu wrote in "Behind Deep Blue" (Princeton Univ. Pr., >>2002) that he had implemented a stripped-down version of the analogies method >>for Deep Blue. It is the unpublished intellectual property of IBM. >> >>Sometimes I wonder if chess program authors mention intriguing nonsense just to >>throw their competitors off the track. I recall someone once letting slip that >>he had used Botvinnik's method for an early hardware-limited microcomputer >>program. That seems unlikely. Nearly 15 years ago an author (Kittinger?) >>dropped hints that he had adopted McAllester's 1988 method "conspiracy number >>search" (aka conspiracy search) for his program, using the term "nodulation". >>Published results indicate that plain conspiracy numbers don't work very well >>for chess. As far as I know, today only experiments on multiprocessor machines >>are being conducted; no competitive microcomputer program uses it at all. So >>was it a mirage -- or a trick? >> >>David McAllester and Deniz Yuret did finally publish their revised work >>(Alpha-Beta-Conspiracy Search. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. >>16--35), nearly ten years after their initial experiments with the >>multiprocessor program Star-Socrates. And ten years from now?... >> >>And what about Berliner's B* algorithm? (Actually Palay's probabilistic B* >>using a probability distribution for evaluation instead of a simple range, today >>suggestive that techniques from fuzzy logic might be applied.) The chess >>machine Hitech was originally built for it in the early 1980's (equal first on >>points but second on tiebreak, WCCC 1986) -- and finally began using it. As of >>mid-1993 it was "almost as good as regular Hitech". In mid-1995 it was still >>"not quite as good as brute force searching." In the abstract of his last word >>on the subject (Hans J. Berliner and Chris McConnell. B* probability based >>search. Artificial Intelligence, Volume 86, Issue 1, September 1996, Pages >>97-156) Berliner writes, "Analysis of the data indicates that should additional >>power become available, the B* technique will scale up considerably better than >>brute-force techniques." Berliner is now retired. More power is available. >>Where are the later papers? Where is B* today? >> >>My suggestion: you are writing a chess program. Go ahead, put in negascout, >>null-move pruning, IID, everything everybody is already doing. Then, look to >>the literature and find some method that everybody is _not_ doing. Implement >>it, experiment with it, and _publish_ your results. Please. > >A nice post. > >Junghanns gives a good overview of all the alternatives to alpha-beta at: > >Are There Practical Alternatives to Alpha-beta?" >ICCA Journal, Vol. 21, No. 5, 1998. pp. 14--32. >http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/junghanns98are.html > >Just take a look at all the chess related research published in ICGA in the last >year: > >ICGA 25(1): > Alpha-Beta Conspiracy Search > (McAllester & Yuret) > [an interesting, but old article] > > A Lockless Transposition-Table Implementation for Parallel Search > (Hyatt & Mann) > [a smart transposition table idea] > >ICGA 25(2): > Nothing! > >ICGA 25(3): > Verified Null-Move Pruning > (David Tabibi & Netanyahu) > >ICGA 25(4): > Nothing! I don't think this issue actually appeared ??? Tony > >ICGA 26(1): [haven't received the issue yet, just looked at > http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/icga/journal/contents/content26-1.htm] > > Nothing! > > >I believe that all this lack of research stems from the Deep Blue - Kasparov >match. Deep Blue's victory convinced many that nothing is left to be done in >chess, so let's move on. The new trend seems to be Go; just take a look at the >two latest ICGA issues: it's all about Go. Maybe that's the reason why the name >ICCA was changed to ICGA ;) > > > >> >>-- Walter
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