
The New Computer Chess World Champion - bdr
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/the-new-chess-world-champion/
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TylerE
I think the real story is how close and competitive the open source Stockfish
engine is.

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thomasahle
That was certainly the storry earlier this year, when stockfish won. Now I
wonder what kinds of improvements Komodo has made to get here. Stockfish is
certainly improving all the time through the fish test project. (and you can
contribute too!)

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onestone
Better SMP scalability mostly. Stockfish still has a definite advantage over
Komodo on fewer CPU cores, and shorter time controls. But it scales poorly
above 8 cores, while Komodo scales almost linearly (the TCEC machine had 16
cores).

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dusklight
I wonder what the game depth would be for significantly more complex games
like Starcraft 2 or League of Legends. Given the way those games track
statistics we should be able to get a definitive answer.

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johnloeber
The game depth for those games is going to be enormously large. Chess is
played with 32 figures on a 64-tile board, and that's enough to give us
serious problems. Games like SC or LoL have way, way more options -- the set
of all possible game states is of such a size that I don't even have a sense
of scale for this order of magnitude.

Think about it this way: the average branching factor of a legal chess move is
35: there are about 35 legal moves that could follow. For Go, the average
branching factor is 250. In StarCraft, how many "legal moves" do you have
available at a given game state, on average? Tens of thousands? Millions?

By the way, this is made significantly more difficult by SC and LoL not being
turn-based games the way Chess is.

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lmm
Maybe. There are indeed many possible moves, but how many represent important
strategic choices that take learning to understand, and how many are just the
obvious thing that even beginners will see how to do after a little study?
(there are plenty of "broken" RTS games where there are millions of choices
but there's a clear winning strategy in building lots of one particular unit
as fast as possible - StarCraft is the exception and not the rule in
sustaining interesting gameplay years after its release).

And if we're talking about computer playability, the real-time nature of these
games cuts both ways; in StarCraft analysis we literally talk about how many
"actions per second" a player was able to execute, a field where a computer
will naturally have an enormous advantage (part of why I prefer to play
Supreme Commander).

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bentrevor
For a second, I was disappointed that chessgames.com didn't have any of the
TCEC games to step through. But the article links to the TCEC site, and it has
its own interface with much more information about what the engines are
"thinking":
[http://tcec.chessdom.com/archive.php](http://tcec.chessdom.com/archive.php)

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CurtMonash
So the article is by Ken Regan? I'm pretty sure he's the best player I've ever
faced, in a casual game when he was checking out grad schools (I think) and
dropped by the Harvard math department.

We castled on opposite sides. Not the best kind of game in which to have a
chance against a vastly superior player. His attack, quite predictably,
punched through faster than mine did.

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chatman
The WC match was held in November between Anand and Carlsen. Fake title!

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logicallee
This is a totally click-baity title. Obviously it should read "The New
_Computer_ Chess World Champion", as it has nothing to do with a New Chess
World Champion, though the title is obviously meant to get your attention by
implying that it does.

(edit: accidentally deleted this comment)

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danieltillett
Well since Komodo will kick the butt of any human it played is it not the real
world champion?

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elliptic
Only in the sense that a team of 11 Ford pickups would be the NFL champion.

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TwoBit
A better example would be a motorcycle vs. Lance Armstrong.

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phaemon
Not really. A motorcycle can't ride a bicycle any more than a Ford pickup can
play football.

Computer programs can play chess better than humans, following the same rules
that humans do.

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Giulalbez
Humans usually cannot take books or a printed compilation of all the chess
games in history, while computers have a database with a lot of chess games.
If humans could take a whole library with them to the match, things would be
different, but then, the reading/writing speed of a computer is much higher
then the human reading/writing speed, so I think the comparison between human
muscles and a gasoline engine is fair. Kasparov playing with no time limit and
his whole library at hand would still be a match for any computer.

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phaemon
I'm sorry you've been voted down, because yours is a common misconception. No
human player can beat the modern chess engines even running on a smartphone
_without_ an opening book.

It's incredible how quickly game engines have advanced. Way back in 2007 Rybka
destroyed all human challengers without an opening book. The current chess
engines are much stronger and running on much faster hardware. There's simply
no comparison any more.

