Earlier quoted context omitted.
People aren't like minimax, they can see 64 moves into the future if there's something about them that fits into a simple pattern.
Potentially. A ladder in go would match this description if the board was large enough. I stand by my comment. Note that the first quote agrees with me: > Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he know, my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few moves later, the computer said that Tinsley had the advantage and a few moves after that I resigned. We know as a matter of literal truth that the computer…
Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
401–410 of 461 posts
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinook was obviously playing the long con. Knowing Tinsley's weakness was his humanity, so it continued to draw until his frail human body succumbed to the forces of nature, thus winning once and for all.
“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go is the Japanese reading of his Chinese name. He was born Chinese, and his surname is 五, the number “5”, pronounced Wu in Chinese and Go in Japanese. Not the same “Go” as in igo (… but the same “go” in “gomaku”, the game of five-in-a-row) His opponents who played him were sometimes mystified, though the reason often becomes clear many moves down the road. He was not afraid of starting complex fights, even ko fights…
His surname is 吳. Not only is it a different character from the one used to write 5, but it's also pronounced with a different tone in Chinese. Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Seigen
This may be way outside of your wheelhouse, but I have to ask -
The Mandarin reading of 源 is yuán. The phonetics are something like [ʲyɛn]. A similar raising of the written vowel occurs in the pinyin syllable yan (e.g. 言, 严, 眼), which is [jɛn]. In other pinyin syllables, an "a" represents /a/, which is something sort of intermediate between the English PALM and TRAP vowels.
It makes perfect theoretical sense that /a/ might be realized as [ɛ] when following a high vowel. But I've always wondered whether yuan and yan really do have a phonemic /a/ there or whether there might be an /ɛ/ phoneme. And it's interesting to me that the Japanese reading of 源, presumably taken from a much older Chinese, uses /e/ there instead of /a/. Can you provide any insight?
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does your comment differ from my comment?
I mean you don't actually have to 'look ahead' 65 moves to know that there is a winning move, even if that move is 65 moves ahead. You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning and will cause a cascade of moves of a predictable-length that will end in an eventual checkmate…
> You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning
Yes, that's exactly what I said in my original comment.
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there needs to be work done and intuition developed in order for a human to look any amount of moves ahead. we do not look ahead in the same way a computer algorithm does I mean, that's just plain wrong on both counts. You need to do work to do a good job at looking ahead. You don't need to do work just to be able to imagine what the board might look like after a particular move is made. > they are not doing things…
you're missing the point of my post. yes the computer prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position. without work, as in developing an intuition for making sense of the game, a human looking ahead doesnt provide value. so im not sure why you think i was trying to say humans cant move pieces ar…
No, pruning is by far the majority of the work the computer does. It is very much not trying to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately, because that can't be done, because there are too many possible scenarios.
And "pruning" and "making sense of the position" refer to the same thing. Interpreting the position is how you prune.
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh fuck yes it would. I rather have a classical 960 tbh
Yeah, classical 960 would be amazing since it de-emphasises preparation.
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're missing the point of my post. yes the computer prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position. without work, as in developing an intuition for making sense of the game, a human looking ahead doesnt provide value. so im not sure why you think i was trying to say humans cant move pieces ar…
> yes the computer prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position. No, pruning is by far the majority of the work the computer does. It is very much not trying to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately, because that can't be done, because there are too many possible scenarios. And "prun…
A computer prunes its moves from either an explicit or implicit (implicit when it's say a trained neural net) database of known positions, with some quantitative sense of strength (usually a probability to win or something like that).
A human needs to assign a narrative to particular branching pathways. These are qualitative instead of quantitative assessments.
A human isn't saying, if I make a certain move there is an 85% chance of winning, and so that makes it my best bet. They're assigning arbitrary structures and narratives to positions, hence why many positions, tactics, and strategies in chess and other games are given colourful names.
The two approaches are very different and have different strengths and weaknesses. Which is why the best play outcome is to combine the computer generated moves with the human generated moves.
The human approach is very good at generalising new information very quickly. Assigning unusual or unfamiliar information in a broader qualitative framework about what good play looks like, think about players who are trying to create certain structures, shapes and patterns on the board.
The computer is very good at applying knowledge about individual moves at great depths. But cannot combine it with any external information. All information about the success rates of moves are determined from the database of all past moves. The computer can't condition those probabilities on things like, does my opponent need to win, or only draw. Do they have a tendency to be aggressive or defensive. Probabilities of success only make sense when taking a population view of the computers input data (a literally impossible task if your talking about the kinds of neural nets used in chess).
So a hybrid approach lets good players condition computer generated moves based on external information. Maybe the computer generates a line of play with 80% confidence of winning, but the human can see that because of certain qualitative structures on the board, the opposing player is more likely to see the solution than the computers population, and so can recondition the lines of play on this new information, even if the human has no idea why the line of play should work 80% of the time. Lines of play that would otherwise have very similar success rates (differing by only a few percentage points say) can be re-ordered based on human judgement.
Both the computer and the human can tell obviously bad from obviously good moves. But their approach is very different when nuance is required.
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#408Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree. Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree. Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.
I am not saying Stockfish is going to solve it. I am saying it will not lose from the initial position. In other words my hypothesis is that we already have a soft solution to chess available. I can't prove it but I can proceed accordingly in practice (in opening preparation or correspondence games for example) and no one will prove me wrong or exploit it.
Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find these conversations amusing because it really is the nerd (I mean that as a nerd myself; not perjoratively) version of arguing about whether LeBron is better than Jordan (in their respective primes) or whether the GOAT is Brady, Woods or LeBron. It's just funny that this same argument structure repeats in radically different fields with (often) very different people. Personally I've never gotten too invested i…
I think you can get pretty close, though. We can now objectively evaluate middle and endgame strength (where you wouldn't gain as much from modern techniques) by using superhuman chess engines.