Author: Mike Stoker
Date: 03:04:02 10/27/98
Hello everyone,
I am a newcomer to the CCC, although I have been passively interested in
Computer Chess for a long time. Please excuse any statments in the following
which appear ignorant!!
I consider that it is high time to move away from the brute force method of
chess playing - ie calculating 100000 positions per second. Whilst there is no
doubt that this have achieved significant results over the past few years, the
fact that top class humans can accomplish as good or better results looking at
just 2 or 3 positions per second would suggest that we might be missing
something.
I believe this missing ingredient is planning. Now computers obviously lack
the features of a human which make our planning so efficient - i.e. logic,
pattern recognition, reasoning etc. All of these things are in essence a way of
generalising a wide variety of positions to extract just the relevant details.
I believe that plans should be built up in much the same way as designs are -
1. Consider the ultimate goal of what we are trying to achieve
2. Break this goal down into a few subgoals
3. Take the FIRST subgoal and break this down into further subgoals
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until we can calculate the moves to accomplish the
first subgoal.
Take for example the case of K and P vs K
The ultimate goal is mate.
Subgoals are "Queen the Pawn" and "Force Mate".
My assertion therefore is that we never need to CALCULATE past the first
subgoal, when we can recognise that conditions are ripe for accomplishment of
the remaining larger goals.
Vast savings in calculations can be obtained by working out general rules to
accomplish the lowest level goals. For example in "Queening a Pawm", a program
needs to work out the rules that if a Pawn is closer to the queening square than
a king, then it just needs to push the Pawn, otherwise, it needs to support the
pawn with the king, by taking the "Opposition" etc.
As a challenge to all chess programmers, it would be interesting to see if
anyone can derive the rules required to promote a pawn without it being
captured, based solely on a knowledge of the legal game moves. This one of the
most simplistic chess positions, but obviously not a trivial task. However, if
we can accomplish this, I believe it will be a giant leap forward in the quest
for more intelligent computer programs.
Mike.
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