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The Kilobyte’s Gambit

vole.wtf

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Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#151

Post by schoen »

Someone wrote: post #127
schoen wrote: post #99

Sharing other people's amazement that such a tiny amount of code plays so well (I'm an inexperienced, infrequent player and it beat me once and drew once), I was pondering that there's no absolute reason to think that small programs inherently must play games poorly. For many abstract strategy games, you could write an explicit game tree search in a relatively small amount of code and it would, in principle, play per…

“but would for small games like […] Nine Men's Morris” http://library.msri.org/books/Book29/files/gasser.pdf : “We describe the combination of two search methods used to solve Nine Men’s Morris. An improved retrograde analysis algorithm computed endgame databases comprising about 10¹⁰ states. An 18-ply alpha-beta search then used these databases to prove that the value of the initial position is a draw” So they built…

Thanks for the information! That game is definitely bigger than I thought. (I knew it was solved, but I'd wrongly imagined it was solved by complete game tree search.)

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#152

Post by schoen »

kuroguro wrote: post #133
schoen wrote: post #99

Sharing other people's amazement that such a tiny amount of code plays so well (I'm an inexperienced, infrequent player and it beat me once and drew once), I was pondering that there's no absolute reason to think that small programs inherently must play games poorly. For many abstract strategy games, you could write an explicit game tree search in a relatively small amount of code and it would, in principle, play per…

Somewhat related: I was blown away when I first heard the argument that intelligence is basically compression. http://prize.hutter1.net/hfaq.htm#compai Haven't done any more digging into this but it did give me something to ponder about.

I've heard of the Kolmogorov complexity connection, but I'm not sure I've seen it spelled out as explicitly as this before. Definitely very interesting!

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#154

Post by wdiamond »

dandanua wrote: post #121
angry_octet wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is I'm getting crushed by an earnest 12 year old. Oh dear.

There are 12 years old grandmasters in the history of chess. The truth is you've been crushed by 1kb javascript code :)

sounds the same for viruses and human kind.

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#155

Post by alisonkisk »

h0l0cube wrote: post #129
bonzini wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pieces were meant to be displayed on a composite (NTSC) display rather than with 4-color CGA graphics. Check out the Twitter thread at https://mobile.twitter.com/pinot/status/1330544777847332879 .

Don't get me wrong, I dig the retro art style, but at that resolution, dithering gets in the way of legibility. I think for the chess pieces themselves it makes more sense to trade off some of the realism (i.e., shading, specular) to better communicate the shapes, particularly as it's so important to game play

The point of composite is they the dithering isn't visible on a proper monitor, because compositing creates an antialiasing effect.

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#156

Post by tromp »

The engine is prone to falling to the following mate in 11:

     1   e4     e5
     2  Nf3     f6
     3 Nxe5   fxe5
     4  Qh5+   Ke7
     5 Qxe5+   Kf7
     6  Bc4+   Kg6
     7  Qf5+   Kh6
     8   h4     d6
     9   d4+    g5
    10 hxg5+   Kg7
    11  Qf7#

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#157

Post by The_rationalist »

ejolto wrote: post #130
The_rationalist wrote: post #45

If I remember correctly the size of DNA is ~100MB

This statement doesn't make much sense to me. Is there a theoretical limit to the length of DNA, or do you mean that human DNA is ~100MB? The human genome is about 6.4 billion base pairs, where each base pair is represented by the letters: Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Cytosine (C), and Guanine (G), i.e. 2-bits. 6,4 billion is then 6.4E9*2 = 1.28E10 bits = 1.28E10/8 bytes = 1600 MB. Or 800 MB if you count the bases as pa…

I obviously meant human DNA.

Thanks for doing the calculus however given that less than 1% of DNA actually has a coding role then it means that a human can be usefully encoded in 8MB.

Re: The Kilobyte’s Gambit

#158

Post by h0l0cube »

alisonkisk wrote: post #155
h0l0cube wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I dig the retro art style, but at that resolution, dithering gets in the way of legibility. I think for the chess pieces themselves it makes more sense to trade off some of the realism (i.e., shading, specular) to better communicate the shapes, particularly as it's so important to game play

The point of composite is they the dithering isn't visible on a proper monitor, because compositing creates an antialiasing effect.

I'm aware of that composite signals tended to bleed pixels horizontally. I used to draw my own pixel art when I owned an Amiga (though to be fair, the monitors were often sharper, and I wasn't always using composite). I grant perhaps it's more legible on a composite display, though I think that's a hard thing to appreciate when delivered on the modern web.
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