Last night I played a few games and realized that it is only a matter
of time before it starts beating GMs like Kramnik.

On Dec 1, 11:08 am, wrote:
Last night I played a few games and realized that it is only a matter
of time before it starts beating GMs like Kramnik.

Well, it's only a matter of time until the sun burns out, too. I
think the two events have roughly comparable time frames. I played
Sanny's program this morning, just to check out his latest claim, the
umpteenth in a long and lamentable series, that the game had been
greatly improved and would "beat me like a carrot":

Sannybot-Kingston: 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 g6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Qxd4 Nf6 5.Bb5?! a6
6. Ba4 b5 7. Bb3 Nc6 8. Qe3?! Bg7 9. Bd2 O-O 10. h3 e6 11. e5? Nd5 12.
Bxd5 exd5 13. h4? d6 14. a3 dxe5 -- Not only winning a pawn, but
dominating the center. 15. O-O?? -- Only Sannybot would first make pawn
advances on the kingside, and then rather than continuing to attack,
instead castle into the weakened area. 15...e4 16. Qc5 exf3 17. Qxc6
fxg2 18. Kxg2 Qxh4 19. Rh1 Qg4+ 20. Kf1 Bf5 21. Ra2 Qd1+ 22. Kg2 Be4+
23. f3 Qxf3+ 0-1 (mate next move).

wrote:
Last night I played a few games and realized that it is only
a matter of time before it starts beating GMs like Kramnik.

It's 'only a matter of time' before a monkey with
a typewriter can write Shakespeare's plays.

But if Kramnik continues to ignore mate-in-one threats,
then Sanny's chess engine has a chance of winning.

--Nick

On 1 Dec 2006 14:27:57 -0800, Nick wrote:

But if Kramnik continues to ignore mate-in-one threats,
then Sanny's chess engine has a chance of winning.

It still bugs me that he didn't see it. I expect that the remaining two
games will be draws as well, so he will lose the tournament because he
missed this forsaken mate-in-one, something even I, a very weak player,
saw. The press is likely to only look at the tournament's end result and
conclude that "computers beat humankind!". That's okay, I guess, computers
beat "us" at many other things as well, but it still bugs me, because the
loss will have been so unnecessary.

This "chess is dying" nonsense is tedious and "trolly" also. The real
competition is between humans. Nobody would state that basic math is
somehow becoming obsolote and not worth teaching or learning anymore just
because computers are better at it than our children. Personally, I still
believe that chess is beautiful and I am not bothered by the fact that my
computer can hand me my arse. In the long run, that will happen to all
board games, including Go.

M.

believe that chess is beautiful and I am not bothered by the fact that my
computer can hand me my arse. In the long run, that will happen to all
board games, including Go.

Actually, that's not a fact, just a distant possibility.

"The search space for Go's game tree is both wider and deeper than that
of chess. It has been estimated to be as big as 10^170 compared to
10^50 for chess, making the normal brute-force game tree search
algorithms much less effective."

http://ai-depot.com/LogicGames/Go-Complexity.html

wrote:
Michael Vondung wrote:
...I still believe that chess is beautiful and I am not bothered by
the fact that my computer can hand me my arse. In the long run,
that will happen to all board games, including Go.

Actually, that's not a fact, just a distant possibility.

"The search space for Go's game tree is both wider and deeper than that
of chess. It has been estimated to be as big as 10^170 compared to
10^50 for chess, making the normal brute-force game tree search
algorithms much less effective."

http://ai-depot.com/LogicGames/Go-Complexity.html

Also, it's much harder to write an effective evaluation function for
Go positions. While a crude materialistic evaluation function can
usually work well enough for chess, there's no equivalent in Go.

--Nick

On 1 Dec 2006 15:02:37 -0800, wrote:

Actually, that's not a fact, just a distant possibility.

Yes, it is just speculation, but CPU speed constantly increases and I guess
at some point "brute force" will even work for Go. I don't see that
happening in the near future, though. Go probably requires "real" pattern
recogniation and I still see precious little research in that area. Still,
let's face it, Go is partly complicated for computers not because it is a
deeper game, but because the board is much larger (19x19 vs 8x8) and stones
don't have an inherit value. There's also a much larger number of possible,
legit moves. Still, if you look back even ten years ago, computers didn't
do well at chess (vs. good humans), and now "we" are lucky to get a draw.
Go is a "larger" game, or "wider", as mentioned in the quote, but I am
relatively confident that both hardware and programming knowledge will get
to a point where even that game will become "solvable".

But my point was really only that it doesn't necessarily matter what
computers do, or can do. It doesn't have, or have to have, an impact on the
competition among humans. In a way, the strength of computers at chess is
an advantage for the casual player, because you always have a playing
partner and a strong tool for analysis. "Many Faces of Go" or "Go++", two
of the better and stronger programs, will lose even to a good amateur, so
to improve past 15? 10? kyu, you actually have to play other humans.
Perhaps I'm just entirely too anti-social, but I see that as a
disadvantage.

Fritz, Shredder, Rybka, etc. are human creations, so if they win vs. a
human chess player, in a way it's still the result of a human vs. human
challenge. I won't worry before a computer programs itself and competes
with a human. But I probably look at this too pragmatically.

M.

wrote in message
ups.com...
Last night I played a few games and realized that it is only a matter
of time before it starts beating GMs like Kramnik.

Sanny seems to be coping a lot of crap which doesn't seem to be entirely
fair. Writing a chess engine is an extremely difficult task and his doesn't
seem to be too bad. It appears to have a reasonably good middle game but
keeps falling down at the end game for some reason.

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 11:10:18 +1100, Michael C wrote:

Sanny seems to be coping a lot of crap which doesn't seem to be entirely
fair.

It's a result of his constant spamming of multiple groups. I killfilled him
a long time ago already, because his posts were rather aggravating. I never
looked at his site or the chess engine. It may be good or have potential,
but his way of marketing it has been entirely counter-productive (at least
as far as this casual player is concerned).

M.

"Michael Vondung" wrote in message
...
It's a result of his constant spamming of multiple groups. I killfilled
him
a long time ago already, because his posts were rather aggravating. I
never
looked at his site or the chess engine. It may be good or have potential,
but his way of marketing it has been entirely counter-productive (at least
as far as this casual player is concerned).

It does seem that if he was a little more honest he'd gain a little more
credability. The main critism seems to be that his claimed time for the
computer to make a move are wrong. Because it's running on the user's PC the
times will be dependant on the speed of their PC.


M.