Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I like to play Chess, but I don't do it too often. I'm pretty good, but not at the level of a club player. Maybe I could give any of you a game sometime.
I personally prefer Go to chess. For a good article about go, see wikipedia's go page.
I'm not saying that chess is bad or boring. It's just that Go, once you get to see all of its strategical depth, is so much more interesting.
Chess is all about hard thinking work and basically nothing else: It's reading, reading and more reading moves ahead, on each move. Naturally there are certain principles and small-scale strategical heuristics which can be applied, but basically it's just more or less mechanical reading moves ahead. This is the reason why computers are so good at chess.
In go you do also need to often read tons of moves ahead, and go does not lose in any way to chess in tactical complexity, specially at certain local life&death situations.
However, what IMO makes go more interesting than chess is that it's strategically much deeper. While chess is basically just a big local fight, go has also much more large-scale strategy concepts. In go it's not enough to just read, read and read moves ahead, but you need to know much more high-level whole-board strategical concepts if you want to be any good. One good example of this is that moves made in one end of the board may have surprisingly strong effect in a seemingly independent other end of the board a hundred moves later. If you were able to foresee a fight in that other end of the board and you made preparatory shapes and took key points in the other end, you may be able to use them for your advantage. This is the reason why computers are so weak at go. In chess there may be some smaller versions of this, but they pale in comparison.
So, where do you guys play this variant chess games? I play them at FICS, you can play me there if you want to, my nick is the same as here, but w/o using space... (samuraigoroh)
Entirely untrue. Deep Blue could think 5 billion positions in 5 minutes but lost to Garry Kasparov who thought 10 positions in 5 minutes. Reti, who was once one of the strongest players in the world, thought in general, no more than 2 moves ahead. Computers are horrible chess players, that is why they have to think so many moves ahead just to compete with the world's strongest.
I did say that small-scale strategies can be found in chess as well. This is, naturally, the reason why the strongest human players can compete almost equally with the strongest computer programs even though humans can't read as far as the programs.
However, go is different from chess in that this kind of brute-force approach made by computer programs is not enough. For a chess program it's enough to code some basic principles on how to evaluate the position and then implement some minimax or other similar bruteforce algorithm to search moves forward. In go, however, this is not enough at all.
That is one of the main differences between chess and go, with regard to computing: In chess it's moderately easy to evaluate the value of a position, while in go it's extremely difficult. Humans are strong at go because they have developed something which could be called intuition (something along the lines of "if I make a strong shape here facing that part of the board, it may help the fight that could ensue there; I have yet no idea how the fight will develop there or even if there will be a fight at all, but it doesn't hurt"). This kind of "intuition" (which is based heavily on experience) is quite hard to convert to an algorithm.
And it's not just about board size. Even at smaller board sizes, such as 9x9, in which complexity is approximately equal to chess, computers are weak. Although brute force is more helpful with this size, it's somehow still not enough. It's still very difficult to come up with an algorithm to estimate the value of a position. The regular 19x19 board is a whole different world in itself, where the strategical consequences explode compared to the small board, making it even more difficult to come up with a decent evaluation algorithm.
Yes, of course a human can sometimes beat a computer in chess if he can find some strategic innovation in that specific game which fools the program. However, this happens only now and then, most often not. In go strong human players beat computers in a regular basis just because they are stronger at strategy. It's not like humans were struggling to beat the computer and succeed in it sometimes through hard work; they don't even break a sweat.
Well, I think that the reason that computers are not that good at the end game in chess is that even though there are less pieces, there are more spaces for the pieces to move to. Though there will be less total moves that each side can make, there will be more open files and diagnols making for more paths to consider, making the computer less efficient. This concept adds another flaw. Playing to beat a computer is much different from playing to beat a person. Using different techniques on a computer that are clearly not the best move often work because of the way that a program works.
But I agree that computers are much better at chess than go and always will be. Amount of pieces remaining on the board is often completly useless in go, so like what Warp says, it is nearly impossible for computers to evaluate positions. In chess, there are some rules to follow that can give a general estimate of position.
Chess's tree is O(c^n)
Go's tree is O(n!)
Chess's tree is also easier to prune compaired to Go's.
From a purely computational standpoint.
I don't like the notion that computer's are somehow inferior to humans because they can't play with strategy. This is patently false. It is simply that no one has had the good idea to pit a computer against another computer, have them play "suboptimal" moves at random, and anaylze the win-loss patterns over several thousand games to learn their own strategies.
This is obviously a non-trivial task programming-wise and computationally. However, it is also scalable. Meaning you could also put it to work on Go.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
For a chess program it's enough to code some basic principles on how to evaluate the position and then implement some minimax or other similar bruteforce algorithm to search moves forward.
Terribly inaccurate. Don't forget opening theory. Disable a computer's opening book (which is centuries of human knowledge and experience, distilled and compressed into a form easily indexed by a computer) and even the best computer in the world can be defeated by relatively weak players. I don't have a good estimate of how weak computers become without opening theory, but I personally have seen a 2200 FIDE stomp all over Fritz in a standard game on a powerful computer in such a situation.
The point here is this: even the best computer chess programs don't just rely on basic principles and brute force algorithms. First they are built upon a human-supplied foundation -- opening theory -- that computer programs are as of yet incapable of spontaneously generating. Furthermore, programs are only just now starting to approach "super" grandmaster strength because of innovative strategic algorithms that attempt to imitate things like intuition through machine learning.
Despite the fact that Kasparov performs poorly against computers, the general consensus is that they still aren't anywhere near as good as humans at chess. Peter Svidler has no trouble with any of the top programs, and in general, when a strong grandmaster loses to a computer program, it's usually because he has committed a serious blunder -- a side effect of fatigue, sickness, or just having a bad day which are all unfortunately human qualities computers will probably never learn to emulate.
It is simply that no one has had the good idea to pit a computer against another computer, have them play "suboptimal" moves at random, and anaylze the win-loss patterns over several thousand games to learn their own strategies.
One idea which has been brought is to a chess or go program which uses a neural net (for some games neural nets are incredibly powerful; for example, if I remember correctly, a program using a surprisingly small neural net can easily beat the best players in the world at backgammon) and put this program to play against itself. Before each game some change is made to the neural net (random change or whatever) and an evolution algorithm is used to select and combine best neural nets found this way. In theory if the program plays millions of games this way, it will come up with a neural net which is extremely strong at the game.
However, if it worked, it would certainly had been made already, so one has to conclude that at least for chess and go it doesn't work.
Deviance, how did you do?
Did anyone here go to the HB Global Challenge last weekend in Minnesota? It had the largest class prizes ever. I was fortunate enough to win one of them.
How about this weekend's Chicago Open?
Lots of big events are going on this time of year.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Deviance I challenge you in chess. I play every day at chess.net and I have actually (as a guest) beaten GM_Roman. But that was a lightning game and he would make my head spin in a real game for sure :)
So if u have chess.net, we could play later if u want. I had before in chess net a handle: AngerFist. you can read my personal post there about my game against Roman, and also against several others Fide Masters.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
ANGERFIST, I could also challenge you or whoever is interested at www.gamecolony.com (chess section)
It's absolutely free and the first games you can even play without registering, you just need a username and a password, thats all.
My nick there is "Vega" so if you are interested just tell me. I also wait for your SSF2 techniuque you promissed before.
Here's a great way to beat the best computer chess program in the world:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary.htm (entry 287).
Playing out that game on the game viewer was one of the most hilarious chess-related things I've ever done. I'm a club-level player, by the way.
Angerfist, that's cool. I just logged in to chess.net and read your finger notes. I shared the account "obwan" (no relation to Obi Wan) there with a friend until they started charging. He played the blitz and standard games on that account and I played the rest (lightning, bughouse, wild, crazyhouse).
I usually play at FICS, though. It's too bad we all seem to play at different places. It makes it more difficult to get together for a game.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
when they start charging people, everyone ran away or certainly (though pretty entitled feelings) did not feel it was worth paying. I agree with you, its very unfortunate that so many good players cannot gather around in a one big single chess gaming/area on the Internet.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
