Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 15:49:55 10/16/03
Go up one level in this thread
On October 16, 2003 at 18:07:08, Dann Corbit wrote: >On October 16, 2003 at 15:25:43, Steven Edwards wrote: > >>On October 16, 2003 at 09:20:20, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>>On October 16, 2003 at 09:06:17, swaminathan natarajan wrote: >> >>>>about 900 n/s >>> >>>It had better be faster. IE a single xeon runs over 1M nodes >>>per second. >> >>How far we have come! >> >>I seem to recall Slate and Atkin reporting that their program Chess 4.5 ranged >>between 250 and 600 Hz on a CDC 6400 (roughly equivalent to an Intel 33 HMz >>80386+80387), and this was enough to give some humans a decent challenge (back >>in the mid 1970s) along with winning the world CC championship. >> >>Processing speed has increased by a factor of forty or so in the past three >>decades. Are the programs/platfrom combinations of 2003 much more than forty >>times "better" than that of 1973? How much of the "better" ratio is due to >>improvements in algorithms? >> >>More specifically, if one were to take Crafty or a similar program that has the >>NWU Chess 4.x as a great grand uncle and run it on a 33 HMz 80386+80387 class >>machine, how would it fare against Chess 4.x running on a true clock speed >>emulation of CDC 6400 hardware? (The last real CDC 6400 was powered off long >>ago, perhaps in the mid 1980s if I remember correctly.) > >I suspect that in a 100 game match, Crafty would win 100 to zero. We could >reverse the question. Take the program of long ago and compile it with modern >compilers. Now try the experiment on really fast hardware. That is a more >important question to me. I don't care how crafty would perform on a 386 >because I have no intention of running it on a 386 at any time or for any >reason. > >>I assume that the more modern program would win most of the time, but it >>wouldn't be that much of a performance mismatch. If today's programs on today's >>hardware are 1000 Elo stronger than the 1973 CC champ, how much of that is due >>to better algorithms vs better hardware? I'll take a guess and say that thirty >>years of advances in software is responsible for no more than 200 Elo >>improvement and perhaps only 150 Elo points. And most of the software >>improvement is due to only a few new ideas: >> >> 1. PVS/zero width search >> 2. Null move subtree reduction >> 3. History move ordering heuristics >Insignificant > >> 4. Tablebase access during search >Insignificant > >> 5. Automated tuning of evaluation coefficients >Less than insignificant. Nobody has ever exceeded the hand tuned values. Right >now, if you do this, it will make your program play badly. I also suspect that >the Deep Blue team harmed their chess engine with this approach. > >This one is the most important: >#0. Hash tables and move ordering > >Without this, you won't achieve #0: >#1. Better evaluation > >>Computer chess was supposed to be the Drosephilia of AI. If so, CC theory is >>still in the larval stage and I don't see wing buds popping out any time soon. >>Where are the CC planning engines? Where are any general pattern recognition >>algorithms in use? > >Because the hand-tuned algorithms are superior. > >>What program has real machine learning? > >Lots of them. Unless you mean genetic style evolution of strength or neural >nets. Both of those have been tried and are flops (as of this date and for >those attempts that have been published). > >>Which programs are >>adaptive and can re-write better versions of themselves? > >Octavius springs to mind. It's a wimp. > >> How many programs can >>converse in natural language and answer the simplest of questions as to why a >>particular move was made? > >That is 10 years off in the future. > >> Where are the programs that can improve based on >>taking advice vs coding patches to the Evaluate() function? > >There are none of those. Nimzo's programming approach could be considered >similar to this, except that the language is typed and not spoken. He uses a >metalanguage that describes chess (IIRC). > >>And the big question: What has CC done for AI in the past thirty years, and what >>can it do for AI in the next thirty years? > >The Deep Blue chess match is the most famous chess match of all time. The >strongest human player was beaten in a game of exponential complexity. > >It is not a good idea to try to predict the future. Even mathematically >speaking and when you have a lot of data points, extrapolations are very >dangerous. > >>Hint: Any remotely correct answer does not include the phrase "nodes per >>second". > >I disagree. Hans Moravec's book shows that in 30 years, our CPU's will be >smarter than we are. And why is that? Not due to superior algorithms, but >strictly due to Moore's law. >http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/revo.slides/2030.html I have some serious problems with that slide. 1. Moore's law is NOT A LAW. Its going to come to an end by 2020, if not earlier. 2. According to his graph, a 486/DX2 is equal in intelligence to a spider. I think not. Even the simplest biological organisms have motor control that is better than anything we can do today. Its pattern recognition is far ahead of the best we can do. We are just now getting to the point where we can have semi-autonomous robots. I would put the spider on the level of a quad opteron or more; we have a long way to go in terms of signal processing before we can even do simple things, let alone reason abstractly as a human does. Will computers ever achieve human like intelligence? I'm certainly not going to state that they aren't. Quantum computers in particular are _very_ exciting. But 2020 (as his slide states) is far to soon. I think even 2030 is too soon. If ever computers surpass humans, they definitely won't be Von Neuman machines. The simple fact of the matter is that chess is much easier than it looks for computers, for the simple reason they don't have to approach it the same way humans do. Anthony
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