Author: Andrew Wagner
Date: 21:29:41 01/27/06
The other day, a link was posted to a fascinating video about the history and future of computer chess (see http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?481541). Lots of very interesting points were made, particularly about comparing how computers play chess to how humans play chess. So, this got me thinking. We know that computers have gotten to the point where they can search millions of nodes per second. Humans, of course, typically only search a few dozen positions. And yet, while top computers have beaten top GMs, they're certainly not far above them, if at all. Why is this? If we could get computers to vastly reduce the number of positions it looks at, would it play better or worse (assuming it looked at the right positions)? It seems to me it would certainly search deeper. Can something like this be done with alpha-beta, or have we reached the pinnacle of what an alphabeta searcher can do? Is hardware the key to better-playing machines, or is there a long way we can go yet with improving artificial intelligence? Some very interesting things to ponder.
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