

Chess grandmasters: Intelligent machines are about to revolutionize the world - edw519
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10017/1028615-109.stm?cmpid=newspanel

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Quarrelsome
Surely the whole Deep Blue thing is just a false dawn for AI. Beating a human
player through brute force isn't _that_ impressive. If anything its obvious.

What would be more impressive is a capped AI that can only look so many moves
ahead and uses principles (such as say Nimzovich's opinionated twaddle) to
win.

~~~
patio11
In quite possibly my only point of agreement with Noam Chomsky, I think our
discussions of AI are impoverished because they turn on a distinction of
language not of fact. Machines that can "think" are AI, machines that can do
impressive calculations but not "think" are just impressive calculators. This
is not a statement about AI, this is a statement about the English word
"think". It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier
can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)

A lot of the other "Oh, that's just a cheap trick" non-AI things are a) much
more useful to humans than the sci-fi notions people think of when they think
AI and b) actually exist in the status quo. For example, if I told you that
there exists a program which can make evidence-based judgments of a human's
character to tell you whether they are likely to be trustworthy or not in
their future business dealings, you would probably say "Egads! That is clearly
AI! Holy cow, that is lightyears ahead of passing the Turing Test, and we're
nowhere near passing the Turing Test!"

But if I told you "The program is called a FICO score" then, pfft, that isn't
AI, that's just clever math and good selection of data sources.

This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field:
after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field. Telling
the topic of a document by reading it and understanding what it is about? AI!
Leveraging anchor text on the link graph to do the work for you? Boooooooring.
Granted, billion dollar business boring but still boooooooooring.

~~~
camccann
_It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim.
(I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)_

"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the
question of whether submarines can swim." \-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

 _This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field:
after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field._

Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI
researchers. It's kind of silly.

~~~
a-priori
_Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI
researchers. It's kind of silly._

... in retrospect.

------
grellas
When I graduated from an ultra-liberal California university in the mid-70s,
computing technology was consistently reviled as soulless, cold, and
dangerous.

It is interesting to have watched this attitude transmute over the years into
a belief, typified in this piece, that such technology will so revolutionize
the world as to work some great deliverance in the human condition.

Back in the day, those who criticized the "Machine" would glorify the artisans
and revel in the idea of human creativity in its pure form (unaided by
advanced tools of any kind). The attitude was almost anti-science and was in
any event highly "humanistic."

Now creativity and technology appear to be closely coupled in the eyes of
young people in academic settings, to the point where information technology,
at least, is seen as having almost redemptive qualities.

Not saying any of this is profound - just wondering if others have observed
this changed perception as well or have thoughts on how it might have come
about. Is it because technology became "personal" as opposed to "corporate"?

By the way, don't play Fritz as a chess adversary - it is like playing a demon
from hell!

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Not only that, but people's relationships with each other have been changed by
machines.

It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was
considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information
on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it. Younger people today seem
to have completely abandoned the idea that they might have a private life and
that privacy might have great value to themselves and others.

The noble savage and artisan view of humanity has changed into a view that
we're all mostly just interchangeable nodes on the world network.

We have become the very machines that we once so hated.

~~~
tokenadult
_It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was
considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information
on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it._

That's a really good observation. People who are below a certain age don't
have much perspective on

a) how mundane most information in FBI files always has been,

and

b) how much more pervasively personal information about most people is now
shared by computerized networks than it was shared by small town gossip.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Is it not that in (a) _the FBI_ have the file that is the issue. Just as now
we'd be concerned if the FBI was keeping particularly close tabs on our FB
details (I mean closer than the standard trawl-net approach).

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abdulhaq
Once I had some (considerable, 3 months) spare time and decided to fulfill my
ambition of writing a chess program. This one would be special - it would work
to a strategy, rather than brute force. 3 months later, and having written it
first in Java, then C++, then C, I realised that it could never compete with
the brute-force millions-of-nodes-per-second crunching machines. This actually
made me become disillusioned with chess as a whole, although the emergence of
Rybka has restimulated my interest somewhat. The idea that strong chess
programs mean that AI is on the march is, sorry, laughable.

~~~
ehsanul
Chess is not where the action's at in AI anyways, so you're right, that idea
is indeed laughable. These days, poker is hot new(ish) thing for AI research,
with it's stochastic gameplay and psychological twist (bluffing and calling
bluffs), and wide range of strategies. See, for example:
<http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/>

------
systemtrigger
The author is an international grand master, the highest title in chess.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff#Chess_career>

~~~
jvdh
That doesn't make him plural though ;)

(The article appears to show only his personal view, not that of others)

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rubyrescue
Well at least we still have Go <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go>

~~~
ugh
Sure, but does it matter? Being the best human chess player on the planet is
still impressive, even if millions of machines can beat you. Not even only
‘still’ impressive – just as impressive as it ever was. It’s probably
(theoretically) possible to build machines that are better at anything a human
might attempt.

------
raghus
_Perhaps if Turing were alive today, he would define artificial intelligence
as the inability of a computer to tell whether another machine is human!_

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socratees
MIT recently started a general AI project
<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/ai-overview-1207.html>

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mark_l_watson
I am surprised Kenneth Rogoff equates chess AI with "real AI."

"Real AI" is a long way off; my definition: ability for systems to learn from
their environment (physical or Internet), change their internal models, and
generally evolve their own abilities without requiring external help.

Off topic: I have never met grandmaster Rogoff, but I watched my friend Carl
Wagner play him in a telephone San Diego vs. Boston match in 1975. My company
SAIC hosted the San Diego end of the match, and I was very surprised to see my
friend Carl playing number 1 board: Carl had been clobbering me at chess
during lunch time for months and I was just about ready to give up the game
since I had a long loosing streak, and I am a poor loser. So, Carl was an
international master, and never mentioned it :-)

~~~
tinker
I was also quite surprised to see Ken Rogoff's comment on AI. He is very smart
and I think very highly of his work, but I think his comment on AI is far off
the mark.

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teeja
Yet another article on superior machines that then rattle on and on about
chess programs. Not news for chess, and _no change_ for the rest of us.

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greenlblue
Fluffy article with absolutely nothing to add to anything other than a
recollection of a small part of history in computer science.

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estrabd
I hate articles like this. And he gets the Turing Test wrong.

