
Computer Moves - imartin2k
http://reallifemag.com/computer-moves/
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kazagistar
I'm pretty sure I read that even human computer hybrids are falling to pure
computers in chess these days, but this author claims otherwise, and now I
don't know what to think.

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smitherfield
Yeah. I'd like to know this as well.

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mrob
Deep Blue did not use brute force search. Like all successful chess engines,
it used heuristics to estimate the value of board positions, and focused its
search on the positions that looked most promising. A truly "indiscriminate"
search would waste so much time on losing positions that even I could beat it.

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amelius
Yes. The challenge now is to come up with a game for which heuristics don't
work :)

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Noughmad
Considering heuristics is the only tool humans have, such a game is inherently
unplayable.

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gcr
Heuristics are also what make games fun and learnable. "I am thinking of a
number between 1 and 10e256" has no learnable heuristics, for example.

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ralfd
17?

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gcr
Darn it! You got me :-)

What's most interesting to me is that if the _human_ is picking the random
number, there _are_ heuristics you could use to guess it. A birthday, for
example. A favorite number perhaps. But perfect play is easy and requires
brute force search.

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BillBohan
One of my favorite numbers is 355/113 but it's still hard to guess.

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BillBohan
I have a simple strategy which has allowed me to win every game of Nomic [1]
which I have ever played.

My strategy is to propose rule changes which allow every player with a nonzero
score to be declared a winner.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)

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standardly
I mean, in the end, it is just humans beating other humans at chess because it
takes other humans to write the algorithms. See what I have done here?

