Hydra slaughtered Adams 5.5 – 0.5.
Fritz defeated Kramnik with human having access to opening database and with special endgame tablebase conditions.
Rybka defeated Ehlvest with machine having limited opening book and human having 6 whites and more time.
Rybka defeated Benjamin with pawn handicap in all 6 games.
What is next? What other odds do humans need to have a chance against the machine?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Human having access to computer? 🙂
Many chess players dislike odds games. I dislike technical restrictions for the computer, maybe with the exception that a ‘normal standard’ computer should be used against a human master, if it’s a PC chess software to play. No need for 32 cpu cores 🙂 But we should see a normal computer chess system with all it’s normal components, not a sabotaged wreck.
A simple time handicap is more natural, like in a simul with clocks. Rybka against 10 GM 🙂 40/2h for the masters each, and 40/12 min. for the computer engine in each game. I think that would reduce the search depths by ~3 plies, relative to 40/2h.
But it would probably be difficult and expensive to find 10 Grandmasters for such an event.
Stop this nonsense.
We don’t do weightlifting against forklifts too, do we!?
Let’s play human-human chess!
I like anon 1:18’s suggestion, combined with permanent brain’s.
Human has access to a computer that must be a normal PC. Human is only allowed to operate the computer during the playing session (5 hours/day) but at the end of the session can set the computer to think overnight with no human intervention. Machine opponent can run on unlimited hardware (32 cpu’s or whatever). Time control is 10 moves/day or so, i.e. faster than postal chess but with enough time that the human can try various candidate moves on his/her PC, write down analysis etc. Human is also allowed consultation with other humans during play.
Odds are not necessary. What’s needed is a firm grasp on reality and the willingness to accept that reality.
People don’t ask what odds are needed in order for a human to swim faster than a speed boat. They don’t attempt to handicap a crane in order to have a chance at lifting more weight than the machine. We all know that it’s pointless to attempt to run faster than a speeding bullet.
If humans cannot defeat a machine on equal terms (each having the same amount of time for the same number of moves) then the machine is the better player. It’s as simple as that.
We don’t go around lobotomizing stronger (human) chess players in order to be able to say that we can (finally) beat them.
Similarly, we shouldn’t be considering handicapping the machines in order for us to be able to defeat an inherently superior opponent.
Instead, it makes much better sense to move on into other realms with our “thinking” machines. We should continue in our efforts to augment the capabilities of our computers. They’re in a far better position to help humanity if they’re not stopped from achieving their true potential.
How about androids (in the far future) such as Commander Data of Star Trek? Would he be handicapped because of his positronic brain? Would he be disqualified because he has a photographic memory of all the openings played in all grandmaster games ever recorded? How would you react to such a hypothetical case? Would you simply exclude Mr. Data and invite him to a nice Go tournament instead?
The real question is: are computers absolutely better? Can the human brain think better than the computer: this is a question of quality: not time. Hence:
1. Humans should be given much more time (+ someone stronger than Ehlvest needs to play!)
2. Also interesting is: Human + computer vs computer. This will answer the question: can the human contribute something better that the computer cannot think?
3. Computer with limited opening database knowledge: this condition can be modified to: computers are welcome to develop their own database: no human help to computers please!! 🙂
I suspect the matches were not played under fair conditions, with the humans receiving cash and the machines not. As long as people think about money, they will lose in chess.
I would like to see consultation games where two or more humans play against the machine and share ideas.
-BlkSabb
September/October 2007
Higher Games
On the 10th anniversary of Deep Blue’s triumph over Garry Kasparov in chess, a prominent philosopher of mind asks, What did the match mean?
By Daniel C. Dennett
In the popular imagination, chess isn’t like a spelling bee or Trivial Pursuit, a competition to see who can hold the most facts in memory and consult them quickly. In chess, as in the arts and sciences, there is plenty of room for beauty, subtlety, and deep originality. Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be–forever–beyond the reach of any computer. But for a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species’ most celebrated intellectual summits–the title of world chess champion–has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all?
The following years saw two other human-machine chess matches that stand out: a hard-fought draw between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep Fritz in Bahrain in 2002 and a draw between Kasparov and Deep Junior in New York in 2003, in a series of games that the New York City Sports Commission called “the first World Chess Championship sanctioned by both the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), the international governing body of chess, and the International Computer Game Association (ICGA).”
The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: “Yes, but machines don’t play chess the way human beings play chess!” Or sometimes this: “What the machines do isn’t really playing chess at all.” Well, then, what would be really playing chess?
This is not a trivial question. The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don’t know when to accept a draw. Computers–at least currently existing computers–can’t be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors always have to contend with, and sometimes even exploit, in their games. Offering or accepting a draw, or resigning, is the one decision that opens the hermetically sealed world of chess to the real world, in which life is short and there are things more important than chess to think about. This boundary crossing can be simulated with an arbitrary rule, or by allowing the computer’s handlers to step in. Human players often try to intimidate or embarrass their human opponents, but this is like the covert pushing and shoving that goes on in soccer matches. The imperviousness of computers to this sort of gamesmanship means that if you beat them at all, you have to beat them fair and square–and isn’t that just what Kasparov and Kramnik were unable to do?
Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don’t like the idea that their brains are protein machines. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov’s brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches.
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True, there’s no doubt that investment in research and development has a different profile in the two cases; Kasparov has methods of extracting good design principles from past games, so that he can recognize, and decide to ignore, huge portions of the branching tree of possible game continuations that Deep Blue had to canvass seriatim. Kasparov’s reliance on this “insight” meant that the shape of his search trees–all the nodes explicitly evaluated–no doubt differed dramatically from the shape of Deep Blue’s, but this did not constitute an entirely different means of choosing a move. Whenever Deep Blue’s exhaustive searches closed off a type of avenue that it had some means of recognizing, it could reuse that research whenever appropriate, just like Kasparov. Much of this analytical work had been done for Deep Blue by its designers, but Kasparov had likewise benefited from hundreds of thousands of person-years of chess exploration transmitted to him by players, coaches, and books.
It is interesting in this regard to contemplate the suggestion made by Bobby Fischer, who has proposed to restore the game of chess to its intended rational purity by requiring that the major pieces be randomly placed in the back row at the start of each game (randomly, but in mirror image for black and white, with a white-square bishop and a black-square bishop, and the king between the rooks). Fischer Random Chess would render the mountain of memorized openings almost entirely obsolete, for humans and machines alike, since they would come into play much less than 1 percent of the time. The chess player would be thrown back onto fundamental principles; one would have to do more of the hard design work in real time. It is far from clear whether this change in rules would benefit human beings or computers more. It depends on which type of chess player is relying most heavily on what is, in effect, rote memory.
The fact is that the search space for chess is too big for even Deep Blue to explore exhaustively in real time, so like Kasparov, it prunes its search trees by taking calculated risks, and like Kasparov, it often gets these risks precalculated. Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of “brute force” computation on their very different architectures. After all, what do neurons know about chess? Any work they do must use brute force of one sort or another.
It may seem that I am begging the question by describing the work done by Kasparov’s brain in this way, but the work has to be done somehow, and no way of getting it done other than this computational approach has ever been articulated. It won’t do to say that Kasparov uses “insight” or “intuition,” since that just means that Kasparov himself has no understanding of how the good results come to him. So since nobody knows how Kasparov’s brain does it–least of all Kasparov himself–there is not yet any evidence at all that Kasparov’s means are so very unlike the means exploited by Deep Blue.
People should remember this when they are tempted to insist that “of course” Kasparov plays chess in a way entirely different from how a computer plays the game. What on earth could provoke someone to go out on a limb like that? Wishful thinking? Fear?
In an editorial written at the time of the Deep Blue match, “Mind over Matter” (May 10, 1997), the New York Times opined:
The real significance of this over-hyped chess match is that it is forcing us to ponder just what, if anything, is uniquely human. We prefer to believe that something sets us apart from the machines we devise. Perhaps it is found in such concepts as creativity, intuition, consciousness, esthetic or moral judgment, courage or even the ability to be intimidated by Deep Blue.
The ability to be intimidated? Is that really one of our prized qualities? Yes, according to the Times:
Nobody knows enough about such characteristics to know if they are truly beyond machines in the very long run, but it is nice to think that they are.
Why is it nice to think this? Why isn’t it just as nice–or nicer–to think that we human beings might succeed in designing and building brainchildren that are even more wonderful than our biologically begotten children? The match between Kasparov and Deep Blue didn’t settle any great metaphysical issue, but it certainly exposed the weakness in some widespread opinions. Many people still cling, white-knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or–just as romantic–as the products of brains composed of wonder tissue engaged in irreducible noncomputational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn’t be responsible, lovable, valuable persons.
Finding that conclusion attractive doesn’t show a deep understanding of responsibility, love, and value; it shows a shallow appreciation of the powers of machines with trillions of moving parts.
Daniel Dennett is the codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, where he is also a professor of philosophy.
Find a new game to play?
Odds games are nonsense. In fact, they should only be considered a different form of chess…a chess variant.
No human can defeat the best chess program without odds. It is time to face reality.
One last match I would like to see is a one between Rybka (with no restrictions) against a team of “Super-GM’s”. Rather like the “Kasparov vs the World” match.
Rybka would win.
Learn from chess programs and forget about trying to defeat them. Technology has surpassed the best human players just as technology can produce more cars than a group of people working without technology/robotics/computers.
Chess rather than a chess-variant, no restrictions on the computer-side, assurance that the computer gets no human input [cf the RYBKA-JUNIOR issues], human assisted by a ‘blunder guard’, e.g. limited advice from a chess-engine on a limited computer.
Man + Machine = Machine
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3935
S.Polgar,
Stop crying over computers’ supremacy over humans in chess .
Start playing GO instead.
You’ll feel better.
There are ~10^44 positions in chess.
Within 50-100 years computers will completely solve game of chess.
There are ~10^90 positions in GO,
and some other things computer can’t grasp in near future ,about the game.
In GO even I can beat computer 🙂
Adams beat himself.
It wasn’t Hydra but his poor judgement that he could play computer like it was another human .
Such approach resulted 5.5:0.5.
Were he clever/prepeared enough he would loose like 4:2 or 4.5:1.5.
Kramnik’s loss judging by strenght of play should be like 3.5:2.5.
One move mate is something I have never seen in classical control games between two GMs.
Have you?
What came to Kramnik ,I think even
he can’t explain.
Benjamin will play one more pawn odds match vs Rybka.
Longer time controls.
He has got intelligence to struggle with computer under such conditions.
More importantly he knows how to learn.
Elhvest,are you kidding ?
It seems that the interest in computer chess isn’t how programs can lead chess theory into new and better directions or what GM’s can learn to improve their games against other humans.
Rather, it is obvious that people (or, rather some people) cannot accept the fact that the “demi-gods” of chess, the Super-GM’s, can easily be defeated by a chess program.
It is this inability to accept what is an established fact (that computers are superior to the best human players…present or past) in chess and computers will only improve at a rate far faster than humans.
It’s the arrogance, the ego of the elite GM’s that astonish me. If you cannot defeat a computer on even terms, then admit it and go on with life.
I find it embarrassing for the chess world to see well known GM’s playing “odds games” against a computer and if, perchance, a draw occurs, then it means a pyrrhic victory for the human race???!
Forget it folks. Rybka is the best and, like checkers, chess, too, will probably be solved in the next 100 years, though this is merely a guess.
The computer isn’t an enemy in chess but a partner to learn from.
Considering a number like 10^44 positions, I am not able to imagine that computers will ever solve chess. It took years to solve checkers which has 5*10^20 positions. Even if we assume that processing a chess position doesn’t need more time than a checkers position (although that seems unlikely), in the solving process: A factor of 2*10^23 by which chess is bigger, is beyond any imaginable future capacities of computer time or -memory.
The number of atoms the planet Earth consists of, is: 6*10^24
‘permanent brain’ makes a slip, taking the earth’s mass in Kilograms as the number of atoms.
The earth’s mass is 6*10^24Kg, even quoted as accurately as 5.9742*10^24Kg.
The mass is mainly in protons and neutrons, each at 1.67*10^-27Kg. So there are roughly 3.6*10^51 protons/neutrons in the earth.
The number of atoms therefore depends on the average number of protons/neutrons per atom. This is 56 for iron, and less for other material.
I’ve seen two estimates of the number of atoms: 10^49 – 10^50, and 1.33*10^50.
Anonymous of 6:45 is correct, I have confused these numbers. I had found a calculation about the earth (Erde) where 6*10^24 kg are given as the mass, and 6*10^49 is given as the estimated number of atoms.
Is there a planet or moon which has about as many atoms as the estimated number of chess positions (10^44)? That would be useful as an illustration, or comparison for that big number. Maybe a smaller planet… I googled for it, but didn’t find something useful yet.
The time for these “man-machine” matches is over. The machines have won. Time to move on to something else. Machine-machine matches will be more interesting to follow than brain damaged computers vs. human. Do that for a while until people become bored with that too.
What is more interesting is what impact machines will have on human chess professionals? Will they be able to survive in this new environment?