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A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

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Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#11

Post by chongli »

opportune wrote: post #10
MaysonL wrote: post #7

I'd be very interested to see how the techniques Google used in AlphaGo would fare if applied to chess.

Monte Carlo Tree Search isn't quite suitable for chess, because it's really only a substitute for games like Go which don't have suitable evaluation functions. If you have the ability to write a good evaluation function, as in chess, you don't need to do the "simulation" phase of MCTS. As a result, you basically just use the "tree" phase, but in conjunction with adversarial search heuristics.

Yeah. Just on its face, there's a ton more ambiguity in a go position compared to a chess position. In many cases in chess, there's only one good move and everything else just loses too much material. That seems to be rare in go

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#12

Post by VHRanger »

MaysonL wrote: post #7

I'd be very interested to see how the techniques Google used in AlphaGo would fare if applied to chess.

They've been doing similar things in Chess for a long time.

For the record, the strategy in Alphago is to pretrain an "intuition" by supervised learning -- they did deep learning on expert games. This is mainly useful for early game moves. For late game play they improved the supervised learning strategy with self-play learning methods specifically MCTS.

In Chess they did the first part by basically stealing knowledge from "opening books" and they do the later game parts with AB pruning.

In Poker they recently did this strategy (look for the "deepstack" poker bot from UAlberta) and were quite succesful. The self play algorithm later on is CFRM. The best poker bot (from CMU) uses CFRM for both the early and late game part with different levels of coarse-graining.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#13

Post by philipkglass »

It was the Type B approach — the intelligence strategy — that ended up being the dead end. Despite their early optimism, AI researchers utterly failed in getting computers to think as people do. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming him with blind calculation. Thanks to years of exponential gains in processing speed, combined with steady improvements in the efficiency of search algorithms, the computer was able to comb through enough possible moves in a short enough time to outduel the champion. Brute force triumphed. “It turned out that making a great chess-playing computer was not the same as making a thinking machine on par with the human mind,” Kasparov reflects. “Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent.”

Chess engines didn't stop evolving after 1997. Later chess engines are stronger than Deep Blue when running on a laptop or even a smartphone. That's even though they evaluate far fewer positions per second than Deep Blue did. In fact, as of 2014 contemporary chess software running on a smartphone was stronger than chess software from 2006 running on a desktop quad core i7.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-pa...

http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-pa...

http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-desk...

Blind speed didn't win the race in the long run. But by the time that was clear, human performance trailed machines by so far that people craving drama from man-vs-machine had lost interest.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#14

Post by justicezyx »

philipkglass wrote: post #13

It was the Type B approach — the intelligence strategy — that ended up being the dead end. Despite their early optimism, AI researchers utterly failed in getting computers to think as people do. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming him with blind calculation. Thanks to years of exponential gains in processing speed, combined with steady improvements in the efficiency o…

I guess non-AI people just cannot understand or acknowledge that thinking is not inherently different than computing.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#15

Post by petersjt014 »

V-2 wrote: post #6
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am having a hard time with the article's black and white distinction of "type A" brute-force chess solvers and "type B" humanlike intelligent engines. To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control of the center, initiative, an…

> To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control of the center, initiative, and all the other values that a human player uses to play chess. But it's just an evaluation function anyway. A very complex one, but still nothing else. Chess…

> All it does is mechanically keep on steering the game towards positions that are evaluted as best by the function.

I wouldn't say so entirely--It's possible to predict multiple moves ahead (before the number of possibilities explodes), and a heuristic is a sort of plan too.

What you're describing sounds like a greedy algorithim more than anything else.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#16

Post by lurker456 »

V-2 wrote: post #6
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am having a hard time with the article's black and white distinction of "type A" brute-force chess solvers and "type B" humanlike intelligent engines. To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control of the center, initiative, an…

> To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control of the center, initiative, and all the other values that a human player uses to play chess. But it's just an evaluation function anyway. A very complex one, but still nothing else. Chess…

While having a plan is important, it's not the only way a human approaches chess. Experienced chess players develop an ability to evaluate positions intuitively. Without being able to explain fully why and without a specific plan in mind, they're able choose the best position out of several options. In a way, it's very similar to a evaluation function without access to its internal logic.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#17

Post by mquander »

chongli wrote: post #11
opportune wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monte Carlo Tree Search isn't quite suitable for chess, because it's really only a substitute for games like Go which don't have suitable evaluation functions. If you have the ability to write a good evaluation function, as in chess, you don't need to do the "simulation" phase of MCTS. As a result, you basically just use the "tree" phase, but in conjunction with adversarial search heuristics.

Yeah. Just on its face, there's a ton more ambiguity in a go position compared to a chess position. In many cases in chess, there's only one good move and everything else just loses too much material. That seems to be rare in go

That's not really rare in Go.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#18

Post by petersjt014 »

xoroshiro wrote: post #4

Kasparov's philosophy on AI in general is quite interesting. He's also a pretty good speaker with a sense of humor: https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_don_t_fear_intellig...

Nice to see him finally at terms after that one 1997 game--he seems to have been touchy about it even as recently as 2014:

"I think we'll never know unless Kasparov says himself, but you probably won't get to talk to him because he doesn't like to talk about the subject...Kasparov spent years suggesting that IBM cheated, and he hasn't really talked about the game for many years - until now."

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/08/338850323/kasparov-vs-deep-blu...

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#19

Post by zodiac »

mquander wrote: post #17
chongli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Just on its face, there's a ton more ambiguity in a go position compared to a chess position. In many cases in chess, there's only one good move and everything else just loses too much material. That seems to be rare in go

That's not really rare in Go.

As someone who plays both games I would say it's less common in Go than in chess. But yeah, by no means is it rare.

Re: A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind

#20

Post by soulbadguy »

justicezyx wrote: post #14
philipkglass wrote: post #13

It was the Type B approach — the intelligence strategy — that ended up being the dead end. Despite their early optimism, AI researchers utterly failed in getting computers to think as people do. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming him with blind calculation. Thanks to years of exponential gains in processing speed, combined with steady improvements in the efficiency o…

I guess non-AI people just cannot understand or acknowledge that thinking is not inherently different than computing.

on which premise do you base this assertion...
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