Author: Tony Petters
Date: 18:44:13 07/13/04
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996144 The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service New world computer chess champ crowned 13:42 13 July 04 NewScientist.com news service A new world computer chess champion was crowned at the 2004 finals in Israel on Monday. The new champ is the latest version of a particularly aggressive and human-like software program called Junior. Unlike most leading chess programs, Junior places less emphasis on the value of individual pieces and more on factors such as mobility and positional advantage. The approach - known as "compensation" - gives the program the ability to find very unusual and daring moves. But it also makes it prone to blunders more reminiscent of human players. "Junior is very interesting," says Frederic Freidel, co-founder of the German company ChessBase, which publishes Junior and a number of other leading programs. "It finds brilliant ideas, but is sometimes also a little bit unsound. But Junior is very cleverly programmed and very fast." The contest ended in a thrilling finale. Junior and the defending champion, a program called Shredder, both stood a chance of winning with just one game to play. But the title was handed to Junior when Shredder could only draw with a lower ranked program called Falcon while Junior demolished the program ParSOS. Freidel says each competing program has its own character. He recounts a recent telephone call from Gary Kasparov, considered by many the greatest chess player of all time, who wondered why Junior was unable to predict the outcome of a particular end game move, while another popular program, Fritz, could. Freidel says emphasis on different factors in the program's algorithms result in these diverse "personalities". Secret tweaks The two Israeli programmers behind Junior, Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, finished developing the latest version of their program shortly before the world championships began. The tweaks they applied to their latest incarnation of the program are a closely guarded secret, but the program will be released commercially by ChessBase in the next few months. Chess programs have grown increasingly sophisticated in recent years. Older programs used to perform exhaustive analysis of potential moves, while today's leading software uses smarter algorithms to reduce the amount of positional searching needed. As the number of possible positions grows exponentially with the consideration of each additional move, older programs required huge computing power. For example, Deep Blue, the IBM machine that famously defeated Kasparov in 1997, had scores of custom-built processors and was able to analyse about 200 million moves per second. Programs such as Junior analyse far fewer moves per second – about three million - but streamline their work by quickly discounting certain search strategies. "We try to include as much 'chess knowledge' as possible," Freidel told New Scientist. This allows current programs to perform more effectively on much more modest computer power. Running on a few desktop computers, programs like Junior and Shredder can compete with the world's leading human players. Kasparov was only able to draw with the older version of Junior in match played in 2003. Although contests between human grandmasters and chess programs are still seen as contest between the human intellect and machine intelligence, chess programs are widely considered too specialised to have much relevance to research into artificial intelligence. But computer chess can still contribute to research in problem solving and algorithm research. Will Knight ---- Who is Will Knight ??
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