
The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer - kirubakaran
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120096385865905161.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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mynameishere
They seemed to rehash some well-known things about Fischer only to posit that
his madness was a result of an inability to be evaluated by his peers, having
no peers. Or something like that. I suspect he was just mentally ill in a
conventional way. People love attributing madness to genius, though.

That said, maybe it's time to stop using chess as a measurement of human
intelligence. Games like Go and contract bridge are still uncracked by AI.

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dfranke
The way that an AI plays chess is nothing at all like the way a human plays
chess. I don't think chess being cracked by AI has any bearing on chess's
ability to measure human intelligence.

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mojuba
Quite the contrary, Daniel. There is only one way of playing chess and both
humans and computers eventually use the method - that's tree search. The only
difference is that those who mastered chess can do some part of the job on a
subconscious level and get results of calculations as "insights".

The entire chess theory that tries to cut branches so to say, and find good
"strategies" for chess - those methods to my understanding change quite often.
Every new chess genius turns the theory upside down. Which only means there is
no strategy in chess except tree search.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

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dfranke
I think you're wrong.

Although both humans and AIs are essentially doing a tree search, the
methodology is sufficiently different that the resemblance becomes
superficial.

An AI's heuristic for evaluating a position is fast and crude, sometimes as
crude as just counting material. Instead it spends its processing power on
looking as deep as possible.

For humans, it's all about the heuristic. We evaluate a position by examining
the "shape" of the board in a way that we don't know how to express well
enough to translate into code. The brain circuitry we're using for this is
visual/spatial. Whatever we're doing is not just a deeper tree search: we
simply don't have the right wiring that we'd be able to do that at a pace that
yields the ability level we're getting. We're only fast enough to examine a
few positions per minute. An AI that ran at that pace would be laughably easy
to beat.

Also, the order in which we search is more like "most interesting first" than
"best first": we search the branches which our intuition has the most
difficult time predicting the outcome of in advance.

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mojuba
You mentioned intuition - so what is it anyway?

There is an interesting mechanism in our minds: when we find an algorithm for
doing something and we do it often, the brain decides to hide it under the
water - sort of passes it over to our subconsciousness. After that the
algorithm or whatever calculations are performed there, in fact much, much
faster - sometimes in orders of magnitude. This starts with walking, our first
steps, and then continues on in whatever we do in our lives. Chess is no
exception. Good hackers can intuitively - and very quickly - find bugs, etc.
That's just subconsciousness with its high-performance computer. The only
thing subc. needs from us is a well worked out algorithm - that's all.

So our intuitive moves or evaluations are just a result of a faster tree
search which is performed "under the water". We are not aware of it - it's a
subconscious process.

As for spatial vision of the board - of course we see the board and the
position in its entirety, it's a spatial game after all. But whether this
vision is of any help in deciding the next move in chess is a big question for
me. Or show me exactly how that works. We sometimes can visually evaluate the
position, but how accurate is that assessment? Something tells me that purely
visual evaluations can be (and often are) wrong.

And yes, AI's heuristic is terrible, but the thing is, AIs (and why on Earth
we call them AI?) do heuristic evaluation to cut branches in the tree search.
If thorough search would be feasible, AIs would be able to give very precise
evaluations, obviously. Meanwhile, we pre-program our AIs with best chess
heuristics known today - something that can be beaten easily by genuises like
Bobby Fischer.

