Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Strongest chess player, ever

en.lichess.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#71

Post by hollerith »

arek2 wrote: post #44
DanBC wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not downvote you. Your comment seems either ignorant of the amount of work involved, or very arrogant about your skill, but does not provide any information for me to judge. Why do you think you could beat even rybka with just six months of work?

Rybka is better than top-20, so I did not claim that. I was a half-pro ~10 years ago. I won the championship of my country. I wrote an M.Sc. thesis on evaluation tuning. If I'd use the standard approach that I already know, 6 months is a conservative estimate. The question is - what for?

>The question is - what for?

Uh, to win prize money?

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#72

Post by sehugg »

DanBC wrote: post #38

Are chess engines still trying to play against humans in an interesting way? (I understand they beat human players, but that people feel computers play in dull ways). Is there a Turing Test for computer chess, where humans and computers play each other and they, and commentators, analyse the play, but no-one knows who is a computer or human until after the commentary is published? And if we ignore humans are people p…

Machine learning is sometimes used to train Go pattern evaluation functions, but we've gotten so good at Chess heuristics that there's very little low-hanging-fruit for ML techniques to pick.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#73

Post by zem »

thejteam wrote: post #32

What I would love to see is work on chess engines having better strength levels for amateurs. For me at least there is a line where everything below a certain level I can beat 95 percent of the time and everything at or above that level I lose to 95 percent of the time.

that's a big problem in scrabble AIs too - there are heuristics for how to dial down the difficulty level, but they mostly involve things like finding the list of best possible moves, and then randomly picking a suboptimal one with how often you do it and how far down the list you go weighted by the handicap level, or constraining the dictionary, or not using lookahead. the problem is that it doesn't always model how actual low-rated scrabble players play, and so does not really make for a satisfying opponent - every now and then you hit a "well, that was stupid" move that just feels implausible for even a weaker human player to make.

the other problem is that the devs of the current top scrabble engines, quackle and elise, are (naturally) focused on getting better and better at playing, not on plausible ways to play badly. it's something i keep meaning to work on when i have some spare time; i have a few ideas, but nothing i've had the time to explore properly.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#74

Post by mcphage »

moron4hire wrote: post #66
asdfologist wrote: post #53

This is extremely impressive - it's cool that talented programmers are pushing the limits of computer science to advance the state of the art of chess engines. However, I also wish that there were comparable efforts to create AIs that train humans. Basically, figure out a way to systematically, efficiently, and scalably train amateurs into masters. That IMO would be absolutely amazing (and something I'd gladly pay fo…

That seems to be what they are going for with the game analysis that also makes alternative move suggestions.

The game analysis is definitely the part of this that interests me the most. That it could beat me isn't that impressive—I'm not that good. But that it could tell me what I did wrong, so I could improve my game... that's really neat.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#76

Post by runeks »

ronaldx wrote: post #63
asdfologist wrote: post #53

This is extremely impressive - it's cool that talented programmers are pushing the limits of computer science to advance the state of the art of chess engines. However, I also wish that there were comparable efforts to create AIs that train humans. Basically, figure out a way to systematically, efficiently, and scalably train amateurs into masters. That IMO would be absolutely amazing (and something I'd gladly pay fo…

In my opinion, this would be a lot more difficult. I am slightly naive as to exactly how stockfish works, but: Computers can do a lot of accurate brute-forcing; humans must see the position in a more holistic, intuitive way. Excellent human players and excellent computer players are presumably doing completely different calculation tasks. I would suggest that computers are still bad at approaching the task in a human…

> Stockfish might be able to tell you what it was doing, but not in a way that it would be reasonable for a human to follow.

I (a non-chess player) just tried to play a game against the highest level AI (and lost, obviously).

Doing an analysis of the game afterwards, this is exactly what I experience: I do "f4" and I'm told (through the analysis tool) that the best move was "Nf3".

Now, the obvious question this leads to is: why? Why was this a better move? I don't think that, as a human being, memorizing "best moves" is going to lead to much improvement: we need to know WHY that move was the best move.

I'm sure there is a human-friendly way to explain why one move is the best move, and why my move wasn't, but the computer probably doesn't know this explanation, because it's approaching it from a brute-force perspective.

Surely, a chess computer can brute force all possible combinations, and deduce that this was the best move. But when this is not possible for a human being, just informing the me that "what you just did was not the best move", doesn't really do much to help me (as an amateur player).

The game, for reference: http://en.lichess.org/ehWjHnIc#0

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#77

Post by ars »

pakitan wrote: post #17
ars wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…

> In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating Chess is 99% tactics/calculation. What we call "strategy" is just a set of heuristics that we use to avoid having to do endless calculations. However, a lot of those heuristics are already included in most chess playing software. So, if you're weak player as a whole, even if you have some strategy acumen, your contribution in an assisted chess setting will b…

I think I misunderstood what "calculating" means in a chess setting. I thought it meant checking the current position of the pieces and making sure you are not about to be attacked.

But googling it suggests it's more about thinking of the value of each move relative to others. If that's the case I'm not actually bad at that.

> I can tell you that it's extremely hard to not just take computer's suggestion at every move.

Is that how it works? The computer just basically plays and shows you some moves it likes?

That's not what I meant, I was thinking that you tell the computer something like: I want to capture piece X using Y 10 to 20 moves from now, perhaps by going via this direction. Tell me the best series of moves to get there while avoiding traps.

Or even better give it 2 or 3 such scenarios and have it tell you how dangerous each one would be so you can pick one.

Basically really narrow down the permutations the computer has to calculate.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#78

Post by icambron »

I always thought of the heuristics for evaluating a chess position as the really hard part of building a chess engine; i.e. how do you capture all of the positional subtleties in a number to feed into minimax? But looking at the source, it's not really that complicated [1]. Can someone who knows more than me comment on that? Is it that the innovations are elsewhere? That good chess really can be boiled down to [1] https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/blob/master/src/evalu...

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#79

Post by varg »

runeks wrote: post #75

Has anyone else watched http://en.lichess.org/tv ? If this is two humans playing against each other in real-time, that is really impressive! It's so mind-boggling fast (mind you I'm not a chess player).

Many games are played 'bullet' style - i.e. 60s each for the whole game.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#80

Post by glinscott »

icambron wrote: post #78

I always thought of the heuristics for evaluating a chess position as the really hard part of building a chess engine; i.e. how do you capture all of the positional subtleties in a number to feed into minimax? But looking at the source, it's not really that complicated [1]. Can someone who knows more than me comment on that? Is it that the innovations are elsewhere? That good chess really can be boiled down to [1] ht…

Nearly all the evaluation terms in Stockfish have been extensively tuned. Joona Kiiski used the SPSA[1] algorithm on a lot of them. Others have been hand-tuned using tens of thousands of games per attempt on fishtest [2]. Fishtest actually just recently got support for running SPSA tuning as well.

There is also a strong bias towards simplification, so if an evaluation feature is not proven to be an improvement it will be removed. Over the last few Stockfish versions, the # of lines has actually decreased in each version.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_perturbation_stoch... [2] http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests

Post reply on HN