
The Real Kings of Chess Are Computers - ColinWright
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-kings-of-chess-are-computers-1420827071
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asdfologist
A major point missed in the article is that computers aren't just stronger
than humans but also play an extremely monumental role in human chess itself.
The entire opening book played by top grandmasters is the result of thousands
(millions?) of hours of computer analysis, and many top-level games these
days, especially the infamous ~20-move "grandmaster draws" are little more
than one grandmaster's home-prepped computer engine analysis being pitted
against the other. In other words, many "human" games are effectively a game
between two computers :)

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pk2200
Chess opening theory is the result of ~150 years of mostly human effort.
Grandmasters do use computers to assist with opening preparation, but it's
certainly not the case that computers have completely rewritten the opening
books. In fact, I can't think of a single example of a computer significantly
altering the evaluation of a major opening system. They do make small
improvements, but almost all of the major openings that were popular 30 years
ago are still popular today.

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toolslive
Does Usain Bolt feel bad about himself, because a Ferrari is faster on the
100m flat? Should he stop competing because of it? Does a weightlifter feel
bad because a fork lift exists? Does this kill weightlifting as a competition?
So why would this be the case for Chess ?

Anyway, is it just me or does the article feel like having been written by
someone who doesn't know about computer chess?

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tbrake
Viswanathan Anand himself had a quote which reflects this mentality and is a
good way of looking at it :

"[...] but since most of chess is tactically based they do many things better
than humans. And this imbalance remains. I no longer have any issues. It’s bit
like asking an astronomer, does he mind that a telescope does all the work. He
is used to it. It is just an incredible tool that you can use."

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blazespin
Great article, [http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/are-computers-
mak...](http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/are-computers-making-
society-more-unequal) which talks about human/computer chess competitions. So
rather than computer versus computer or human versus human, it's a hybrid.

What I'd be curious about though, is there ever a case where the strongest
computer program + a human could beat the strongest computer program?

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asdfologist
You're referring to Advanced Chess [0]. Yes, humans do add value, or otherwise
this form of chess wouldn't exist at all, i.e. the human's best strategy would
be to always take the engine's top recommended move.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess)

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gwern
But at some point Advanced Chess will be 'dead' in the sense that the best
human players no longer help the best software win: the human will pick better
moves less than poorer moves, and blow games. It's hard to tell when, but
given how large the margin is, and how finely balanced the best chess engines
are now (Lipton has some interesting posts on computer chess, most recently
[https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/the-new-chess-
worl...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/the-new-chess-world-
champion/) ), I wonder if that moment has already passed?

~~~
Houshalter
Another observation is that humans only add value for their pattern matching
ability. Computers have worse heuristics, but make up for it by being able to
explore many moves into the future.

But now deep neural networks have been catching on. They've shown good results
on Go, being able to predict the move an expert would make 44% of the time.

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raymondh
The article makes a surprising and unattributed assertion, "Mr. Kasparov’s
obsession with Deep Blue’s surprising strategic insight was partly responsible
for his loss in their 1997 match. Today, smartphones play better than IBM ’s
supercomputer did then."

Does anyone have a link or attribution for this? I would be gobsmacked to
learn that 2015 smartphones play better chess than Deep Blue in 1997. Could
this possibly be true?

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Athas
You have to remember that Deep Blue was not a top-of-the-line supercomputer in
1997. It was a large machine for sure, but the software made it a chess
champion, not just the raw hardware. Many 1997-era computers were faster.

~~~
Someone
But it did have quite a bit of custom, chess-specific hardware.
[http://chess.wikia.com/wiki/Deep_Blue](http://chess.wikia.com/wiki/Deep_Blue):

 _" It was a massively parallel, 30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system
enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips"_

Also, [http://www.csis.pace.edu/~ctappert/dps/pdf/ai-chess-
deep.pdf](http://www.csis.pace.edu/~ctappert/dps/pdf/ai-chess-deep.pdf) states
that the VLSI chips _" provided most of Deep Blue's computational power."_

That page also answers a question elsewhere on this page about whether
computer+human can beat computer. As long as the computer is imperfect, humans
may be able to analyze and improve it. In particular, Deep Blue had a weakness
that it couldn't learn about. Programmers changed its program to correct for
it:

 _" The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games,
an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's
play revealed during the course of the match. This allowed the computer to
avoid a trap in the final game that it had fallen for twice before."_

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stolio
Can't find the link but I once saw Carlsen (or maybe Nakamura?) say a computer
miscalculated the value of a pair of pawns in a position. Essentially the
value of the pawns wouldn't become clear until much later in the game and the
heuristic the computer attached to space could overvalue it in certain
circumstances. More common than that is a top player might make a move that
the computer disagrees with until it gets to a depth of 20+ moves when it
suddenly thinks it's THE winning move.

For a really interesting computer vs. computer game see Kingscrusher's
commentary on Houdini vs. Rybka:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWdMqvGMxF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWdMqvGMxF4)

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kingkawn
A computer can win chess, not invent it.

~~~
rpearl
[http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33767/yavalath](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33767/yavalath)
is a board game that is commercially available and was generated by a
computer. It's got a decent rating, too. Higher than chess, in fact :)

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kingkawn
hahaha i was wondering how long it would take for my statement to be wrong

