4th Computer Chess Tournament

An anonymous reader writes: "The 4th computer chess tournament is being held online at Internet Chess Club over the next two weekends. Over 50 chess programs are involved, from commercial engines to amateur homebrews. Most will be operated by their authors. Details at CCT4 homepage. Last tournament (CCT3) there was live commentary by titled human chess masters. If you're a fan of chess or computer chess programming, login to ICC this weekend as a guest and watch the action."

How long do the games last?

Especially with no speed throttle on the chess programs, I would imagine a normal game could be over in a few seconds.

Hardware

As for the hardware, you are free to use what ever you want. It would be impossible to try to get all participants use the same computer-power and to make sure that they do.


Imagine.... :)

Without equal hardware platforms, this will be hard to be more than just entertainment. It isn't much of a good benchmark of the programs involved.

This is especially true when you consider that certain processors are usually faster at certain critical operations in cases like this. It also apparently doesn't ban ASICs and other things that could make a huge difference. On the plus side, maybe we will start seeing PCI chess accelerator cards. :)

Chess Programming.

I really have to give major props to these guys. Once in school I wrote a basic chess game. The algorithims in it are hard as hell to write. And even harder to get them to win games. These guys must really know there stuff and I just have to say good job and good luck to all who entered!

What about this:

I'd like to see a distributed chess engine. I think it would be fun to pit us against Deep Thought. It's kinda off topic, but something I've been thinking about.

chess nerds

as if getting picked on for being in this chess club wasn't enough.. they had to go make an internet chess club to insure that nerds will get a good beating by the jocks.

Will they be printing out move-lists...

I think it would make it wholly more entertaining if they printed out move-lists and provided a viewer which reproduced the moves, say one or two a second.

It'd make the games more interesting to those of us who actually play (and don't just code chess), and it would get the public involved (can you picture a CNN short on this without having any sort of visual representation - it's the only way it'll get coverage!)

Shannon and chess programming

I was reading through the biography of Claude Shannon (information theory guy) and was surprised to read that he also did important research in chess-playing computers. The biographer suggested that his innovations are still in use today. Does anybody know more about this? How do you program a computer to play chess, anyway?

Re:Shannon and chess programming

http://www.howstuffworks.com/chess.htm [howstuffworks.com]

(Is there anything that site doesnt have?)

Re:Shannon and chess programming

How to program a computer to play chess: ($0.10 version)

The underlying idea: you try an build an exhaustive tree of every possible move, and every possible response to that move, and every possible response to that response, and so on. This gives you a full tree of all possible games; You then choose a branch on the tree which results in you winning.

The problem: This tree is huge. After just a few moves, there are literally billions of potential board positions which must be considererd. Even Deep Blue (the recent Kasparov killer) wasn't able to perform full board evaluation, even with all it's specialised chess-playing hardware.

The solution: Rather than trying to exhaustively search the entire possible move tree, only search those branches which "look promising". This is assessed using a scoring system of some kind.

It is this scoring system (called a heuristic) which is the source of all the research. This is a source of interest to information theorists as the problem of finding a chess heuristic is easy to understand, but non-trivial to solve. Essentially, the problem is to reduce the "information" describing a board position into a single boolean "this is a winning position"/"this is a losing position".

If you're interested, seek out an introductory AI textbook (or website), and look up alpha-beta pruning. I can recommend "Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach" by Russell and Norvig. The website for the book is here [berkeley.edu]

Russ %-)

Chessmaster?

I always wondered why Chessmaster and other well known commonly avaliable commercial chess programs don't compete in these competitions. I would think it would provide:

1) Great exposure for your program
2) A great way to motivate your programming staff to work at 100%
3) A way to show you are number 1

And for the programmers, if you acutally win, it would seem one of those great things you can put on a resume.

So why no chessmaster?

Re:Chessmaster?

Chessmaster [chessmaster.com] is not a fully functioning chess program. It is really more of a DB full of a shit-load of games (at least with CM 8000) and a teaching program. While I agree with damn near every other player in the world that CM is the best commercial chess program for learing, I have huge doubts with how it would match up in competitive play. I can reguraly beat CM8000 and I'm a tentative ~1500+ rated player. (In comparison the top three players in the world [fide.com] are well above 2700 and two are above 28.

Re:Chessmaster?

Usually they do compete.
Chessmaster is not an engine per se. It uses "the King", which was written by König. If the King is not in the competition it is probably because it is a bit old and not up to the challenge of beating Fritz, Deep Junior, Shredder, Chess Tiger/Gambit Tiger, Ferret and the other really strong programs.

USCL

USCL [uschesslive.com] is better than ICC, and free for all US Chess Federation members.

Related

There were plans to hold The World's Largest [onlineworldchess.com] chess tournament ever (via the 'Net but the record would go beyond "just a 'Net record"). The event has been put on hold due to "The present economic situation and dramatic turn down of internet sales in the aftermath of September 11."

More details are at the site and at the FIDE's network site [fide.com] (Fédération Internationale des Échecs).

As far as this tournament is concerened, I welcome it entirely and enthusiastically. Finally there will be a way for the greatest chess programmers (in theory) to be under the "same roof" and possibly get together to swap secrets so that the mid-level bots on-line could actually dish out something other than four variations and stumble the rest of the way through.

And to any players on /. that are also on USCL [uschesslive.org] drop me an email through my link and we'll see if we can get together for some games.

See you on board :o)

Gnuchess

Why isn't gnuchess [gnu.org] in this tournament? I'd love to see how it stacks up to all the other engines.

Kasparov

So if Kasparov operates an IRC client, would that be cheating?

Chess for the Hive Mind

If you want to play your own game of chess against people all over the internet, check out SICO [snoot.org] . People take turns playing a single move in all sorts of wacky variations. It's weird but addicting...

ICC history

It pains me that on a site dedicated to open source that we should entirely ignore the history if ICC. Once there was the Internet Chess Server (ICS) which was free, source could be obtained and all. Then one of the people maintaining the server decided to make it propietary and charge for membership. Of course a splinter group decided they wanted a truly free server and that became the Free Internet Chess Server (www.freechess.org), however their lofty ideals came to an end when they saw others using their ideas and not giving back to the community (GPL does not stipulate you must distribute your software) and since then the version of the server software available to download as not been updated.

Now I don't mean to rant about percieved evils, whats done is done, but for a site dedicated to open source I believe this must be mentioned.

distributed

i'm thinking that the best way to win this thing is to use a distributed algorithm running on a large number of machines somewhat like SETI. obvisouly with the time/bandwidth constraints you'd have to have some efficient way of sending out the move information to your network. maybe you could have a tree-like structure with super-nodes having high-bandwidth connections farming out information to subordinates. maybe the brute-force aproach wouldn't work so well against a 'smarter' single-machine solution, due to the exponential nature of the search domain, but i still think it would be cool to see such an entry in a competition like this.

What I want to know is...

...why isn't IBM entering?

Beyond chess...

Besides computer chess, Contract Bridge has also held its own Computer Bridge tournaments [3web.ne.jp], of which the strongest has been Gibware [gibware.com]. Would be interesting to see more different type of AI tournaments.... Maybe a tournament between the smartest Quake 3 or Counter-strike bots...

Human Players?

Does this competition allow for human players? Is there any way for a human to "cheat" and pretend he is a computer, from the standpoint of the competition?

I think it would be interesting to see the results of a surprise "black knight" human player thrown into the mix. (Or perhaps even more interestingly, a human/computer team.) We're at a unique point in computational history -- the best human players can still normally beat out the best computer algorithms, though just _barely_. A decent chess player could probably still take home the prize. In 20 years, however, even the best humans will no longer stand a chance against any reasonably serious chess program.

Bob

bad choice of words:

> watch the action.

As interesting as chess is, "action" is a pretty piss-poor word to describe the game.
Suspense, maybe. Action, not unless steven segal burst in and sprayed the place down with a machine gun.

Answers to all your questions...

Hmm, where to start. My name is Mig Greengard and I run Garry Kasparov's website. I work with Shay Bushinsky, who is one of the programmers of Junior, the current world microcomputer chess champion. Just leaping at a chance to karma whore in my specialty. Let me cruise through the various questions and misperceptions I've seen so far.

This is an online tournament held in the biggest online chessplaying site, the ICC. The games are "60 + 10" time control, meaning each computer gets 60 minutes on its clock and 10 seconds are added for each move. So games can last up to 2.5 hours, tops. If you think this is long, this is what we call "rapid chess." Classical games can last up to seven hours.

Uniform hardware has pretty much been given up. They still distinguish between microcomputer and massive machines like those at NASA and Deep Blue, but everything is pretty much wide open these days. The programmers try to get the best hardware they can and usually know very well which platform is best for their program. (There WERE hardware chess accelerator cards, by the way. Back in the 80s when RISC and dedicated chess processors had better cost/chess performance ratios than CPUs. This hasn't been true since the Pentium, although various "Deep Blue on a chip" initiatives exist, including one by a member of the DB team.)

Anyone with a Slashdot account automatically forfeits the ability to call anyone else a nerd.

Move lists and online replay are both available on the site in the original post and at the ICC. Move lists are called "PGN" (portable (or player) game notation") which is an ASCII format used in databases but can be printed out and read easily if you know algabraic chess notation. Online java game viewer applets are quite common.

Both Shannon and Turing spent quite a lot of time on chess algorithms. Shannon actually wrote the first chess program before a computer existed. He 'ran' the program using slips of paper and generated moves this way.

The chess programming breakdown already posted is pretty good. The key concept these days is brute force speed versus knowledge. 20 years ago most programmers thought you needed to make the thing somehow think like a human because the brute force method was so slow. Intel and Moore won. The "fast searchers" now dominate thanks to the minimax algorithm. It just looks at one line after another and counts the beans to rapidly prune. Programs differ to an extreme degree in the amount of knowledge they apply. (HIARCS, for example, is one of the few "slow" programs at the top. It applies a lot of knowledge and looks at maybe 1% of the number of positions the fast programs like Fritz and Junior check.) A top level program, and the top 5-8 are roughly equal at a given time, will look at over one million positions per second. This sounds like a lot (well, it is a lot), but it only puts the program at a level equal to a top 100 level player at a classical time control. (At faster time controls, particularly blitz games of just minutes per side, computers are lethal. Humans just can't play mistake-free chess at that speed.) A program will look six-eight moves deep on the average, but extension will dive deeply into promising or unclear lines, sometimes up to 20 moves in a middlegame position.

Those who think chess is solvable should speak only theoretically. The number of positions is one of those great "million times the number of stars times the grains of sand in the world" numbers. The current method of tree and pruning adds less than one full move of search depth when you double processing power (node count). So the diminishing returns are very much here. The game of go is even worse for comps. Top programs still can't touch the human masters. Back-solving chess using massive databases starting with just a few pieces has had a big impact on computer chess in the past decade. Invented by Ken Thompson (yes, that Ken Thompson), endgame tablebases can now play any combination of five pieces (and many combinations of six) perfectly. This leads to humorous situations of a computer making optically stupid moves to reach a tablebase position it knows for sure is a mathematical win. (Tablebases allow the once-fantastical announcements of things like "checkmate in 45 moves.")

Most of the top commercial programs ARE playing in this event, but most people, particularly chess-ignorant Americans, only know Chessmaster. Fritz, Junior, HIARCS, and Shredder are all top commercial programs. In the chess world, Fritz is almost synonymous with chess program. Chessmaster has a very strong engine (called The King) by a well-known Dutch programmer. Various versions of The King have participated in these competitions and done just fine. Chessmaster has no reason to put its name brand on the line in these bloodbaths. An open tournament like this of only 11 rounds is not at all scientific, for one, but there mostly it's that since all these programs are so strong the power of the engine really isn't the most relevant thing when an amateur buys a chess program. Features like training materials, game databases, GUI, and graphics are much more relevant. Any decent program will kill you on even a low level unless you are an expert.

There are dozens of places to play online, and most of them have computer players as well. KasparovChess has multiple versions of the champion program Junior running and a new one generates when someone starts a game with one so you can always give it a try. (It's a dumbed-down version or it wouldn't be much fun.) The sites with the most players are, inevitably, Yahoo! and MSN. Their software and community suck, of course. Location, location, location. Of the specialist sites, the ICC, chess.net, and KasparovChess.com (my site, as disclosed above) are the largest and best. They have downloadable client software and administrated communities as well as live events, lessons, etc.

There have been many attempts at the holy grail of a massive online tournament. The biggest problem is simply cheating using these programs we're talking about. I could go on for a few dozen pages about methods and countermethods for catching cheats, but basically it's impossible at the end of the day. Don't get me started. KasparovChess hosted the first super-tournament to be played online, in the beginning of 2000. We had human observers with each Grandmaster, all over the world. We also hosted the largest online tournament so far, the world school chess championships. Thousands of kids from hundreds of schools around the world played. (Gotta trust the kids and teachers, right? Right? Actually there were several accusations made, but no decent cases.)

Yes, the ICC used to be free, and that free internet chess server (FICS) is still alive and well, although it is rapidly losing market share. There was a long and bitter battle about that split and the use of the FICS kernel, which is the foundation of just about every chess playing site in the world.

We cover top computer chess events, of which this one really isn't, but if you want to browse around some start here, at the last world championship. WMCCC [kasparovchess.com]

It sounds funny, but in the computer championships they have to play face to face and the programmer himself has to make the moves. The worry, of course, is HUMAN cheating, that is, a strong human helping the computer in an online event. The wisdom of a human Grandmaster combined with the accuracy of a computer program would be a devastating combination. (They have competitions of this, with GMs using computers while they play. It's called 'advanced chess' and was introduced by Kasparov. It's interesting, but not always dramatically superior quality chess.)

You can also stop by and play for free, either with an account and a rating or as a guest. We have a java applet if you don't want to download and install. We also have a lot of "learn to play" materials if you are one of the sad crowd that think it's just another board game.

Saludos, Mig

Learning chess progs

I was recently looking for a customizable chess program which learns. My idea was to have the computer play itself, over and over again, after each game changing the attributes of each of the players(E.G. attacker/defender, peice values etc.). It would result in a very smart program after a couple months of processor time dedicated to it(as a screensaver)..

Article in Wired Magazine

Wired had an article about computer & chess, computers & humans & chess, computers & humans & chess & cheating in the October 2001 issue:

This time it's personal [wired.com]

subheader: Humankind battles to reclaim the chess-playing championship of the world.

Opening strategy against computers?

I've heard that the best openings to play against computers are the ones that are positional in nature instead of tactical. That is, computers are clumsy when it comes to general assessments of the board, whereas they are better at direct attack and defense. So human chess adepts generally avoid these tactical situations. Additionally, when chess adepts play computers, they tend to deviate from well-known or standard opening lines to get the computer "out of book" as soon as possible.

I wonder, though, if there are any particular opening strategies when computers play each other, as opposed to human v computer? It seems to me that chess programs with good opening books would almost never fall into well-documented opening traps like the one that claimed Kasparov in his losing match [cs.vu.nl] against Deeper Blue. Do computers stick to the tried and true main lines when playing against each other, or would employing opening "novelties" work well?

IMPORTANT

IMPORTANT: Please read the whole post

I'm sure many of you are aware of this thread [slashdot.org] already.

If you are interested in helping against the moderators who have been "editing" the thread, please read this [slashdot.org].

Please do not moderate this post down. It is good for the long term, but if you still feel like being someone who denies the horrible truth, give me your best shot. You will help hold all of Slashdot users back in the long term.

For more info, read this piece [kuro5hin.org] from an apparently superior news site.

HAL9000 not invited??

Why isn't HAL9000 invited? sure will beat them all!

Not sure I see the point...

One of the biggest problems when watching someone play chess, is that you think you know what play should be made. When actually playing, this often translates to a mistake. i.e. you can't truly understand or appreciate the game unless you are playing, or getting a commentary from someone who knows whats going on. Now Kasparov himself has said that there isn't much point in strong human players playing strong machine players, because the machines will win (they are better). So ultimately, when watching this tournament, no one will really understand any of the moves!

Re:Bobby Fisher

I am not entirely sure about this but I think it is Gary Kasperov who is currently believed to be the better player. Feel free to let me know if I am wrong.

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots

And so the mighty software chess intellects duke it out in the web for all to see. It is tribute to humynkind's creative impulses that we find such enjoyment in watching our creations interact with one another. As with the television show "Robotwars", the duelling automatons seem to take on lives of their own.

The next expected step will be to combine the two, software intellects with hardware brawn, creating robot minions that do not require human controllers. Of course if we are not careful, the darwinian effect of these artificial gladiators' constant struggle with one another may be to bring about a race of super robot warriors that turn on their creators and exterminate humankind, turning the Earth into a real-life version of the nightmarish Cylon Empire featued in the "Battlestar Galactica" television program.

So we must be careful not to let the cheap thrills we get out of watching robot conflicts get the best of us. We must do all we can to integrate peaceful, loving ideals [gnu.org] into software and robot development so that perhaps in the future we will be able to lie in harmony rather than strife with our creations.