I used to be a pretty good chess player, but both my boys outstripped me. (Chess was the only thing I forced on my children. I made them play when they didn't want to, then when they weren't bad, I stopped pushing and let nature take its course.)
Alan reached the top 40 in the country as a professional and to my horror I realized he wasn't pushing wood, but playing to a pattern. These top players look at the board and they see a positive or negative pattern in the arrangement of pieces - so they move to make the negative - positive!
I haven't played them for several decades. I'm not that stupid.
But to the computer. As I understand it, in Kasparov's matches, the IBM computer wizards were changing the machine all the time. As information came in about Kasparov's play, they would make adjustments.
So Kasparov was playing a different machine all the time - until eventually he made a mistake and it won - the other games in the match were draws - as I recall.
Chess is like all games. People are playing people and although we expect bluffing in Poker, Bridge, and suchlike - the same thing goes on in Chess matches. When Alan played, he was not necessarily playing to win, but playing for the best monetary return.
Then, of course, there was Lasker, who smoked an ill-smelling cigar which would be puffed into an opponent's face. But, of course, that would never happen now.
Harry
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Selma wrote:
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It seems to me that this article fits some of the recent discussions on this list in some oblique way.
Selma
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist?
January 25, 2003
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they will
say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport
and the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess
might be just a very complex math problem and there is
immediate resistance.
The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow in
New York, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked player and
the former world champion, will play a $1 million, six-game
match against a chess program called Deep Junior. It will
be the fourth time that Mr. Kasparov has matched wits
against a computer and the first time since he lost a
similar match in 1997 to Deep Blue, a chess-playing
computer developed by I.B.M. Recently, Vladimir Kramnik,
Mr. Kasparov's former protégé and the current world
champion, tied an eight-game match against another chess
playing program called Deep Fritz.
Whether Mr. Kasparov wins or loses, clearly chess computers
have reached a point where they can compete against, and
sometimes beat, the world's best players. Even Mr.
Kasparov, always reluctant to acknowledge that anyone or
anything might be superior to him over a chess board,
admits that the point at which computers consistently play
better than humans is probably not that far off.
But if computers become better than humans at chess, does
that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess
is essentially a complicated puzzle?
The question arises partly because of the very different
ways that humans and computers play chess. People rely on
pattern recognition, stored knowledge, some calculation and
that great unquantifiable - intuition. Computers, on the
other hand, have a database of chess knowledge but mostly
rely on brute force calculation, meaning they sift through
millions of positions each second, placing a value on each
result. In other words, they play chess the way they attack
a large math problem.
Chess is not the only field where computers have achieved
success formerly thought to be achievable only through
human creativity. In 1997, six months after the victory by
Deep Blue, a competition was held at Stanford University
between a human and a computer to see which could compose
music in the style of Bach. The computer won. Monty
Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill
University in Montreal who has just published a book called
"Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone," thinks
that the question of what chess is is fairly clear. "There
is no question that it is a puzzle," he said. "Some people
like to imagine that it is an art form."
But if that were the case, some chess players reply, then
why are so many people who play chess well not good at
math? David Goodman, an international master, said that
chess players come from many backgrounds with different
skills. "In international tournaments, it's true, I've
played a grandmaster who became a math professor at 23. But
there are others who were writers and lawyers and even one
who played soccer on Norway's national team," Mr. Goodman
said.
Others do not see the implications for computer supremacy
in chess in black-and-white terms. Murray Campbell, a
developer of Deep Blue who still works at I.B.M., said that
Deep Blue's designers had adopted a scientific and an
engineering approach when building the computer, but that
the results could be viewed as artistic, regardless of what
produced them.
"The question reminds me of the question that often gets
asked in artificial intelligence," he said. "Is the system
intelligent? It is because it produces intelligent
behavior. If it does something artistic, then it is
artistic. It does not matter how it did it."
Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the
University of Alberta who created Chinook, the best
checkers playing entity in the world, thinks that checkers
and chess are art and sport, regardless of how well
computers play them. "As a competitive chess player in my
younger days, when I played a beautiful game, I wanted to
frame it and put it on the wall," Mr. Schaeffer said.
"Chess is also a sport because it is incredibly mentally
and physically demanding. That computers play it better
does not lessen any of the enjoyment that we can get from
the game."
For his part, Mr. Kasparov thinks that chess is art and
sport as well as math and science. If there were a clear
answer about what chess is, he says, "then the game of
chess is over."
Mr. Campbell of I.B.M. worries that chess could be
relegated to the realm of a complex math problem if
computers ever "solve" the game - figure out all the
possibilities and know the result regardless of what moves
are played. For now, while computers have managed to solve
all endgames where there are six or fewer pieces on the
board, it does not seem possible that they will be able to
solve the entire game given that the number of chess moves
in an average game is estimated to be about 10 to the 40th
power. That number is so large, it would take the most
powerful computers billions of years to calculate it.
But, Mr. Campbell said, if computers do ever solve chess it
would ruin it artistically. Already, he said, those
endgames that computers have solved sometimes take so many
moves that the ideas behind them are at times hard to
follow. "That is not beautiful," he said. "It is just
incomprehensible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/arts/25TANK.html?ex=1044502355&ei=1&en=29ad17fecbf0dd34
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.445 / Virus Database: 250 - Release Date: 1/21/2003
