Author: Walter Faxon
Date: 23:40:10 06/11/03
Go up one level in this thread
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 It is the unpublished intellectual property of IBM.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!
>
>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
Hello, Omid.
First, thanks for you thoughtful response to my recent post. I have been from
time-to-time disappointed that there is not more AI content on CCC. It very
much seems to be a hobbyist board, playing with the current programs and
building duplicates of them, albeit with minor differences in emphasis and
implementation. I've been guilty of this myself in the bitscan threads. But
the few times I have tried to raise the level of discussion have been met with,
mostly, silence. My last post was to an extent, a "last gasp".
My response viz. Go. In my opinion, tackling Go is a mistake for one reason and
one reason only: very few Westerners play Go at better than a weak amateur
level, and most don't play at all. In contrast, in the West chess is well-known
as an "intellectual" pastime, and hundreds of thousands of people play it well
enough to at least appreciate much of the practice of the masters. Chess is a
good AI testbase because chess exhibits many understandable problems amenable to
AI methods while eliciting non-AI interest -- in both the readers and writers of
AI papers.
I have not reread Andreas Junghanns' 1998 "Are There Practical Alternatives To
Alpha-Beta in Computer Chess?" but there is one obvious objection to the thesis
("no"): a small number of human beings can (still) play chess at least as well
as the best chess computers. That amounts to an existence proof that brute
force is not the only way. And finding out how to emulate the best human
techniques in chess may be reasonably expected to have applicability in other
areas of problem solving -- maybe even Go!
But of course we now know that chess can be effectively tackled using
(relatively smart) brute-force techniques. Using any more complicated AI
methods tends to lose vs. the finely-tuned fast searchers, so the papers
experimenting with new methods tend to be of the "one-shot" variety, with no
follow-ups.
Thus, my solution (mentioned in a CCC post some months ago): a competition in a
new field of study: Limited Search Computer Chess (LSCC), with rules similar to
that of the "RoboCup" international robot soccer competitions, the most
important of which is: all code is made public after the tournament is over.
First cut: 100 positions per second, max.
Some sort of prize (a little money, even) would be a great incentive for such a
competition. I might offer it myself except that right now I am literally
broke. Maybe in a few months.
Thoughts?
-- Walter
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