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Subject: Re: Fruit fly races

Author: Stan Arts

Date: 06:08:43 04/07/05

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Hi Steven

I agree with Anthony and others that AB-type program play very good chess on the
current type of computerarchitecture, but I agree with you that these programs
don't always play chess in a very interesting way. To the human eye. Or that
there are different interesting ways to make a computer play chess.

So your approach to Symbolic is very interesting.

As for myself, a few months ago I started with a new rewrite of Neurosis.
Unfortunately can't seem to be motivated to write another chessprogram with a
regular search, (and try to make it competitive to the strong programs, because
there are a lot of them already, and takes a lot of effort to get anywhere
near.) and I'm tired of the AB-type style of chess.
Instead, I'm trying to combine an AB-type search with a more AI approach.
It has sort of an overhead. That will be like a conscious brain that tries to
steer in a certain direction, form "ideas" and remembers them/sticks to them.
And an AB-search part that looks at tactics, and positional consequences, like
"normal".  But the overhead will still have influence on that and if a best AB-
move really steers away from the current "idea" it might look for an
alternative, and things like that. (So the search won't be very efficient, maybe
getting true scores for several moves. But that's not so important. )

So, I hope my program will be able to do things like:
Bluff. (If I've got a good position and formed a plan, but the plan turns to be
bad later on by search, then maybe still continue the plan (depending on a few
things) , and hope the opponent won't find the refutation.)
If I've found I'll be mated by a really deep mate, not to sacrifice material to
be mated in 11 instead of 10, but to play for complication, and hope the
opponent doesn't see/find the mate.   And things like that. It's not really
possible to make a regular AB-program do that.
This will only have use against humans, ofcourse..
And the search will be fairly similair to previous Neurosis's one, so I can
mostly work on this overhead thing. Hope to have some news about it in a few
months..

Goodluck with Symbolic !

Stan


On April 06, 2005 at 18:29:07, Steven Edwards wrote:

>From: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html
>
><Quote>
>Q. What about chess?
>
>A. Alexander Kronrod, a Russian AI researcher, said ``Chess is the  Drosophila
>of AI.'' He was making an analogy with geneticists'  use of that fruit fly to
>study inheritance. Playing chess requires  certain intellectual mechanisms and
>not others. Chess programs now  play at grandmaster level, but they do it with
>limited intellectual  mechanisms compared to those used by a human chess player,
> substituting large amounts of computation for understanding. Once we
>understand these mechanisms better, we can build human-level chess  programs
>that do far less computation than do present programs.
>
>Unfortunately, the competitive and commercial aspects of making  computers play
>chess have taken precedence over using chess as a  scientific domain. It is as
>if the geneticists after 1910 had  organized fruit fly races and concentrated
>their efforts on  breeding fruit flies that could win these races.
>
></Quote>



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