
A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess and the Human Mind - razorburn
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-brutal-intelligence-ai-chess-and-the-human-mind/
======
philipkglass
_It was the Type B approach — the intelligence strategy — that ended up being
the dead end. Despite their early optimism, AI researchers utterly failed in
getting computers to think as people do. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by
matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming him with blind
calculation. Thanks to years of exponential gains in processing speed,
combined with steady improvements in the efficiency of search algorithms, the
computer was able to comb through enough possible moves in a short enough time
to outduel the champion. Brute force triumphed. “It turned out that making a
great chess-playing computer was not the same as making a thinking machine on
par with the human mind,” Kasparov reflects. “Deep Blue was intelligent the
way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent.”_

Chess engines didn't stop evolving after 1997. Later chess engines are
stronger than Deep Blue when running on a laptop or even a smartphone. That's
even though they evaluate far fewer positions per second than Deep Blue did.
In fact, as of 2014 contemporary chess software running on a smartphone was
stronger than chess software from 2006 running on a desktop quad core i7.

[http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-
pa...](http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-part-one)

[http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-
pa...](http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-deep-blue-revisited-part-two)

[http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-
desk...](http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-desktop-
challenge)

Blind speed didn't win the race in the long run. But by the time that was
clear, human performance trailed machines by so far that people craving drama
from man-vs-machine had lost interest.

~~~
justicezyx
I guess non-AI people just cannot understand or acknowledge that thinking is
not inherently different than computing.

~~~
amagumori
it's not _inherently_ different from computing but i don't think any of our
current architectures are amenable to "real thinking". a computer that really
thinks needs something much, much different from a von neumann or harvard
architecture. so much different that it would almost be weird to still call it
a computer.

------
V-2
I think brute force (coupled with powerful heuristic of course) is the optimal
way for increasing strength of chess play in engines. It has long ago
surpassed even the best humans anyway.

What is interesting to me - and really underexplored at the moment - are chess
engines that are more human-like, but not for their strength of play. They
might be a tad weaker, but much more useful for humans.

Such an engine would be able to annotate (human) games _reconstructing_ most
likely intentions of the players - which is what a good human annotator does.

It would therefore be able to teach humans by identifying their specific
weaknesses on _conceptual_ level; not merely highlight bad moves.

It could truly play like a human for entertainment or training - current chess
engines suck at it, you can weaken them, but their mistakes won't have the
same feel as blunders made by human opponents.

Such intelligent chess engines might be able to perfectly simulate playing
style of human masters, living or deceased (based on recorded games of course)
- so one day we might find a fairly probable answer to how exactly would a
1975 Fischer-Karpov match play out : )

Or generate beatiful, breathtaking games on purpose (there's already been some
research devoted to evaluating beauty in chess, eg.
[https://en.chessbase.com/post/a-computer-program-to-
identify...](https://en.chessbase.com/post/a-computer-program-to-identify-
beauty-in-problems-and-studies)).

------
xoroshiro
Kasparov's philosophy on AI in general is quite interesting. He's also a
pretty good speaker with a sense of humor:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_don_t_fear_intellig...](https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_don_t_fear_intelligent_machines_work_with_them/)

~~~
petersjt014
Nice to see him finally at terms after that one 1997 game--he seems to have
been touchy about it even as recently as 2014:

"I think we'll never know unless Kasparov says himself, but you probably won't
get to talk to him because he doesn't like to talk about the
subject...Kasparov spent years suggesting that IBM cheated, and he hasn't
really talked about the game for many years - until now."

[http://www.npr.org/2014/08/08/338850323/kasparov-vs-deep-
blu...](http://www.npr.org/2014/08/08/338850323/kasparov-vs-deep-blue)

------
MaysonL
I'd be very interested to see how the techniques Google used in AlphaGo would
fare if applied to chess.

~~~
opportune
Monte Carlo Tree Search isn't quite suitable for chess, because it's really
only a substitute for games like Go which don't have suitable evaluation
functions. If you have the ability to write a good evaluation function, as in
chess, you don't need to do the "simulation" phase of MCTS. As a result, you
basically just use the "tree" phase, but in conjunction with adversarial
search heuristics.

~~~
chongli
Yeah. Just on its face, there's a ton more ambiguity in a go position compared
to a chess position. In many cases in chess, there's only one good move and
everything else just loses too much material. That seems to be rare in go

~~~
mquander
That's not really rare in Go.

~~~
zodiac
As someone who plays both games I would say it's less common in Go than in
chess. But yeah, by no means is it rare.

------
ScalaFan
Interesting but I believe that there are events where computers + humans beat
just the computers. That shows that there must still be something else that
the human adds to the situation that brute force hasn't been able to overcome
yet.

~~~
devoply
umm the brute force more or less learned from the humans, that's how it
narrowed down the search space to a manageable level. it's not as if cracked
the entire search space all on its own as the search space on its own is quite
a bigger than something that even the most powerful computers can tackle.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Yeah, I am having a hard time with the article's black and white distinction
of "type A" brute-force chess solvers and "type B" humanlike intelligent
engines.

To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is to
neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different weights
to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces, control
of the center, initiative, and all the other values that a human player uses
to play chess.

~~~
V-2
> _To say that Deep Blue beat Kasparov with nothing but brute-force speed is
> to neglect the rather intelligent decisions it made, ascribing different
> weights to pieces in potential sacrifices, positions, development of pieces,
> control of the center, initiative, and all the other values that a human
> player uses to play chess._

But it's just an evaluation function anyway. A very complex one, but still
nothing else. Chess engine doesn't have a notion of a _plan_ (which is how a
human approaches chess). All it does is mechanically keep on steering the game
towards positions that are evaluted as best by the function.

~~~
lurker456
While having a plan is important, it's not the only way a human approaches
chess. Experienced chess players develop an ability to evaluate positions
intuitively. Without being able to explain fully why and without a specific
plan in mind, they're able choose the best position out of several options. In
a way, it's very similar to a evaluation function without access to its
internal logic.

