Chess Improves Machines and Humans Alike 163
erick99 writes "Chess provides a window into some more arcane philosophical matters. The remainder of this article will focus on two difficult, and interrelated, questions. The first has to do with the nature of reality; the second is about the prospects for human and artificial intelligence in grappling with reality. In both cases, the search for an answer leads through a board game with 32 pieces and 64 squares."
Vulcan science (Score:3, Insightful)
The article has little to do with the game of chess, it is a philosophical piece (it strikes me that invoking religion in a philosophical debate is a bit like invoking Hitler in any other argument...). It's a bit thin too - saying that you can use the same word to describe different things doesn't imply any necessary connection between those things; it could mean we interpret the word based on its context...
I have little time for philosophy: the endless soul-searching and argument over subtle nuance seems pretty meaningless - you can't root an argument in reality when you're debating the existence of reality! Accept that and move on. I happen to agree with Popper about falsifiability, but that's just an opinion...
Perhaps we ought to just accept the universe does exist, then perhaps we can start to do something useful rather than pursue ultimate logical deriveable truths (although I guess the Vulcans got their warp drive first, hmmm)... The greatest breakthroughs in science were made once the ancient Greek philosophic method was turned on its head and transformed into the scientific method we use today. Theory and practice, unified in harmony; either on their own regarded with suspicion - look at cold fusion and string theory...
Simon
Re:Vulcan science (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, philosophy essentially is religious argument.
Thus invoking religion in philosophical argument is like introducing Hitler when the subject is Nazis.
KFG
Re:Vulcan science (Score:3, Insightful)
It often starts out that way.
Once interesting issues are framed, they sometimes get answered and a new concrete subject area is born.
Mathematics and geometry are two examples. We would hardly call those fields "religious argument" today, although it may have seemed that way at first.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:5, Insightful)
I generally deny the claim though.
Certainly the philosophies spawned science (which is why science degrees are still degrees in philosophy), but there is a descernable dividing line between the sciences and the philosophies.
That dividing line can be summed up in one word:
"Proof."
Or disproof, as the case may be.
As a Zen Buddhist I "know" that the world we percieve with our senses is one of illusion, that there is an underlying physics which may often be very different than what we think the world is like. As a physicist I can demonstrate this. What I "know" must give way to what I can demonstrate.
One will find the "missing link" in Descarte, widely held to be the founder of modern scientific thought, but whose arguments were still largely rooted in theology. To one not raised within the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition he can be rather tough sledding on this account.
There are certain fields beyond the pale of science, where philosophy still rules the roost, where only it has "answers", but those answers cannot be proven or disproven. They are held by belief and "faith."
Thus the answers philosophy provides are the basis for interminable argument without resolve, and often bloodshed.
Science cannot resolve the question, "What is the best way for us to live?," although much to its disgrace it often pretends that it can (it can certainly quantify and predict certain aspects of how we live, which is a useful thing to do, but it cannot scientifically define "best").
I would suggest that there is, philosophically speaking, no particular reason why we should exist at all, and the question of such isn't a scientific one. We do, or do not, exist.
Is happiness, perhaps, a measure of how we should live? The extreme behaviorists amoung us would deny that hapiness even exits. Yet I know that hapiness is at least a major factor to be considered. Philosophically. But I can't for the life of me tell you what hapiness is. Nor can I convince you of the Satori state, because I cannot demonstrate it, you must experience it yourself. .
And even then it might be illusion.
It is meta-physical.
Thus it is argued about ad infinitum. Suzuki drives me to distraction sometimes. He should have talked less and meditated more, but he came from the academic philosophical tradition of Buddhism.
Thus arguing the unprovable, while it has certain validity, and can even be instructional in one's youth, in the end amounts to little more than masturbation of the soul. It makes you feel good, but leads nowhere except feeling good (which in itself, granted, might, philosophically speaking, have some validity).
Bear in mind also that most of, if not all, the really deep questions (including those engendered by accelerating technolgy and industry) where argued nigh unto death many, many thousands of years ago. At some point it becomes like watching the same episode of Gilligan's Island over, and over and over again.
It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before. You suddenly realize that it's silly and trivial. Then you find out your parents had heard it all before long before you were born (this is always a revelation to youth, whose timeline innately begins with their own selfconciousness, thus the tendency to try to teach grandma how to suck eggs, and ultimately to Twain's observation about how much his father had learned in just a few short years).
So argue philosophy while you are young. It's a necessary part of the development process, like learning not to piss on your hands, and don't forget what you learned by it as most people seem to do.
But there really isn't any point in trying to teach pigs to sing. It wastes your time and only annoys the pigs.
KFG
Re:Vulcan science (Score:3, Interesting)
I've come across several of the ideas you've mentioned before, the most central to my post being the idea that philosophy is the realm of non-provable theories. This is an idea I can hardly disagree with.
It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before.
This is true on the tim
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2)
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
Thanks for your clarifying logic on the parent's attempted guilt by association equating religion with Nazism. That was bigotry pure and simple.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
In that sense he was trying not to associate relgion with anything. He was objecting to such association.
He was, perhaps, further confused by the entirely modern shcool trying to pretend that philosophy has secular underpinnings. It certainly is true that it has nonchristian underpinnings, and to those who first formulated the idea that philosophy was secular nonchristian and secular lo
Re:Vulcan science & Godwin's law (Score:1)
Your probably right. In retrospect, I see that my knee was jerking a bit.
For all who are interested Godwin's law [astrian.net] states:
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
Invoking Hitler when the subject is politics.
FP.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2, Informative)
Geometry (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a strange thing back then when philosophers said "Let's not measure things, not even REAL things, instead lets think of the IDEA of spatial relations". The idea of the line, equations, and all of those other fundamentals we all learn today. It was math in the philosophical sense. (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 ) (or the shortest distance between two points is....)
If that had never happened, if they hadn't stepped back from the drawing table to theorize and philosophize, we wouldn't have the solid mathematical foundation we have today.
So, the same may be said of other philosophies. Stepping back from reality, and thinking about things that seem unrelated may eventually turn out to be the exact opposite.
Re:Geometry (Score:1, Funny)
You misspelled "ephemeral yet useful".
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
Apperantly the writer of this news item did not understand that and decided to do the next best thing. To submit a news article via plagiarizing the article's third paragraph. After all, this is slashdot, no one reads the article. Who would notice?
You read fast... (Score:2)
Re:You read fast... (Score:2)
Yes. Of course, a true philosopher can never know...
Simon
Slashdot Turing Test (Score:1, Offtopic)
Leon: Troll? What's that?
Holden: You know what a loser is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Deckard (Harrison Ford) giving a test. You're deleting spam from your inbox. You come across a full page nude photo of a girl.
Rachael (Sean Young) Is this testing whether I'm a spammer or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2)
A philosopher would have had something constructive and interesting to say. You sound more like a troll to me.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily. The greatest engineering breakthroughs maybe. But not the greatest intellectual breakthroughs.
Look at computer science for example. People never thought about the existance of a "general purpose computing machine" till Bertrand russell came by. Russell, a great philosopher posed this question (which can be simplified as):- "If I can represent formulae using abstract symbols and data using abstract symbols - can formulae work on formulae which work on data ?" - Presto ! there came an idea - there can be a formula (computer) which takes a formula (program) and apply it to a symbol (data). This was the motivation behind Church's lambda calculus and Turing's Turing machine. Once they came up with turing machines, it was just a question of time before someone built them. So you see my friend, Knowing that a thing exists requires a bit of philosophy. Actually finding it is simply an engineering effort.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
Not necessarily. The greatest engineering breakthroughs maybe. But not the greatest intellectual breakthroughs.
Look at computer science for example. People never thought about the existance of a "general purpose computing machine" till Bertrand russell came by.
You seem to have forgotten Charles Babage.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:1)
It doesn't matter that they knew The Turk was a fraud, as all that was required was "thought about the existance of". E.g. The book 'Inanimate Reason' was written a century before Babbage.
FP.
Philosophy of Mind: Today's Source of AI Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of use who have studied and performed research in AI know that "android epistomology" (the study of the space of possible thoughts in an android mind) is a very vibrant and important topic that is widely debated. The term "android epistemology" was first coined by Clark Glymour in a sourcebook on this topic.
Rudolf Carnap [utm.edu] was the first to combine propositional logic with natural language to come up with a general philosophy of high-level thought. His ideas were rigorous enough to be considered computer programs, and yet he came up with them in 1928!
Recently, we heard about the Robotic Race, a 150-mile race of autonomous vehicles, where the winner only made it 7 miles. Want to know why the winner didn't get farther? It got a tire stuck in sand, and wasn't "smart" enough to realize that flooring the accelerator wasn't doing any good, so it burned the tire off, right down to the rim. Had it included in its space of possible mental states the idea it could disengage an axle, it could have gotten out of its hole and kept going. It didn't have the "mental capacity" to step back, reflect, and consider an alternative idea.
The question of how we, as humans, are able to adjust our "space of mental thoughts" to external conditions is hardly even addressed in the modern AI literature, and yet it's precisely this kind of question that philosophers identify as an important problem and ask first!
So, we owe philosophy a debt for often framing the correct questions for other to later answer.
Re:Vulcan science (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you've some good thoughts but it's rather confusing- what's the main point of your comment?
RD
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2)
IMHO, I think that philosophy is a mostly pointless exercise that occasionally yields extraordinary results.
Give the Vulcan scientists a chance, and they may draw some insight into the description of reality. I play chess, and have found that it
Re:Vulcan science (Score:2)
Sure you can. I think therefore I am.
= 9J =
Great chess jokes (Score:4, Funny)
"Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer."
Q. What's the difference between a chess player and a highway construction worker?
A. A chess player moves every now and then.
Which football team has a couple of chess pieces missing?
QPR
Q. What is the difference between a chess player and a couple on a blind date?
A. The chess player mates then chats......
Regards,
(courtesy of Graham Moore)
Q - Which group of women are the best chess players?
A - Feminists. Their opponents begin with King and Queen,
but *they* always start with 2 Queens.
What about GO? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game. Though it's been a while since I've read this, so this may have changed. But this has been a reason why computer logic enthusiasts have been enthralled with this game for many a year.
A little offtopic...but...by the way, while on the topic of Go: did you know that the original selling price of KPT Bryce [auntialias.com] was determined over a game of go? Eric Wenger (the original developer who based all of the fractal math on the work of Ken Musgrave [kenmusgrave.com], originally an aprentice of Dr. Mandelbrot himself) thought that Bryce should be a "Hollywood Tool" and cost over $7000 (back in the early 90's!). But Kai Krause thought it should be a tool to "empower the creativity of the average person" and said the pricepoint should be set at $99.00
So they decided to let a game of Go decide it. Thankfully, Kai won the game!
Re:What about GO? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about GO? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just getting into the game, and haven't even played against humans much. I must say it gets my interests more than chess. I have to ask, has the same amount of resources been put into creating a Go program as there has into Deep Blue?
I don'
Re:What about GO? (Score:3, Interesting)
My suggestion: play against humans, much. Get an IGS (PandaNet), KGS and NNGS account, and use them all. They're free btw.
Playing against computers will teach you bad habits. GnuGO has painfully weird and awful style (no offence to the developers, it's a great accomplishment nonetheless, and they'd be the first to admit its shortcomings - some of them hang out on NNGS). Many Faces of Go is better, but it's still nothing like play
Re:What about GO? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Congratulations, you are the winner of the "+1, first one to talk about Go in a chess story" moderation. You get free admission to the club -- but I'm afraid that given that searching Slashdot for chess stories reveals several hundred, parking will be a bit scarce.
I love Go (Score:5, Informative)
Chess has proved the value of a brute force approach--even without a lot of AI routines, simply searching the game tree and adding up the value of the men left on the board is a workable algorithm. Good chess programs improve on that significantly with rules to prune the tree search, and further rules to score a board position. That doesn't work so well in Go: There are 361 points on a Go board, with a typical game lasting some 200 moves--an unimaginably large number of game combinations. Worse, there's no easy way to assign a value to a board position once you've brute forced your way through the combinations. The combination of these two factors is one reason why there are no really good Go playing programs, as there are in Chess.
Go is a great game to play on the Internet. You can order all the books you need to get you started, and then you can play on the 'net. There's not bad Go implementations at Yahoo Games, etc., but eventually you will move up to the real go servers like Kiseido [kiseido.com] or Panda [pandanet.co.jp], both located in Japan.
Re:I love Go (Score:4, Interesting)
But on this Go v. Chess topic, let me add that I read an article a while back (don't have the URL, sorry, may have even been a print article) that examined stroke victims. Strong Go players who suffered brain damage to one of their hemispheres but not the other would play a worse game, but the nature of the loss of playing skill would be very different depending on whether the stroke hit the one half of the brain than the other; one side (don't remember whether left or right) would lose their tactical/fighting ability in the game, the other side would lose their ability to work with large abstract territories. The article pointed out that chess players would lose basically all their chess ability when the damage was to one side of the brain (the one that matched tactics in go), and would lose very little ability when they suffered damage to the other side.
Anyway, it indicates that one of the ways that go is very different from chess is that it needs skills associated with the abstract/intuitive side of your brain and skills associated with the logical part of your brain, while chess needs primarily skills associated with the logical part. Perhaps this is why some people prefer one game over the other? If you love chess for its tactical reading, then you might not care for the abstract parts of go, which you would find boring. Meanwhile, a player who enjoys all of the game of go might find chess interesting but "lacking something."
Anyway, I'm not going to argue which game is better, just play what you like and let other people play what they like, no need to criticize either group.
Re:What about GO? (Score:4, Informative)
Forget true master, no current GO program can challenge much more than a raw n00b at the game. The highest rated programs are around 10 - 15 kyu, which is to say they play better than a rank amateur, but not by a lot, and suffer from the fact that they can be confused into making horrible moves if you exploit certain flaws in their AI. Once you learn what moves exploit their weaknesses, you'll beat them everytime no matter how bad you are.
A huge branching factor and the lack of anything remotely approaching a clear evaluation algorithm will probably hamper computer Go for years to come.
Re:What about GO? (Score:2)
If Chess has these implications, imagine what a good match of GO will do for you! Both man and computer alike! Simple to learn, arcane to master offering a lifetime of fulfillment.
Great, Go-zealots. I've nothing against the game itself but some of these people are more predictable than the Gentoo/Debian trolls.
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game.
I have no idea what a "Ches
Re:What about GO? (Score:5, Interesting)
The nuances of the game far exceed those of chess. Simple rules, but beauty galore. It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old.
How could it be boring?
Re:What about GO? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it can still be boring even if you do know how to play it, just like the Xanth novels can be unfunny even if you get all the puns. I'm not arguing that you are wrong to like Go (or even, God forbid, Xanth novels), just that your argument claiming that people who find Go boring must not "get it" is flawed.
It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old.
How could it be boring?
Because
Re:What about GO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Curse my karma.. :(
Wow, I'm having a hard time determining if this parent post is sarcastic or not. Uh.. No, it's not flawed. Knowing the rules of the game != knowing how to play. I would say that 'g
Re:What about GO? (Score:2)
That's not really true.
It's like card games, some like bridge, some like poker.
There will always be those who prefer Peirs Anthony to Italo Calvino.
The subtlties of GO cannot be explained outside of the game itself, and it takes quite a bit of playing until one can fool themselves into believing that they understand it.
Screw chess. Play Go. (Score:5, Insightful)
A zen master was once asked, "What is the greatest game ever invented by man?"
He replied, "Chess, of course."
His chela asked, "But, what of Go?"
The master replied, "There was go before there were men."
pandanet.co.jp [pandanet.co.jp]
Sorry, bad URL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sorry, bad URL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sorry, bad URL (Score:2)
One thing I've noticed when playing GNU go is that the moves required to beat a computer are different. The computer is relentlessly correct in
was: Sorry, bad URL (Score:1)
Dang. (Score:1)
Re:Screw chess. Play Go. (Score:4, Funny)
Man, that's deep.
Re:Screw chess. Play Go. (Score:2)
So you're saying it was invented by women?
Re:Screw chess. Play Go. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, The Obligatory Go-Chess Flamewar begins (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit like Linux advocates saying "Screw Windows. Run Linux." everything Windows was brought up.
I let the reader draw their conclusions about this statement
(P.S. I run linux both in the office and at home. And I am completely at loss in Windows).
Re:Screw chess. Play Go. (Score:2)
The Nano-Hurdles We Now Jump (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Nano-Hurdles We Now Jump (Score:5, Funny)
It is not until 2004 that Slashdot User "radiumhahn" finally answers the question definatively, "Who cares?"
The Slashdot moderation "Insightful" proves the point is, indeed, insightful, and a deep and powerful question is finally laid to rest, once and for all.
Thank God for you, "radiumhahn"! Where ever would philosophy be without your "Insightful" contributions?
Re:The Nano-Hurdles We Now Jump (Score:2)
How can a brace of quail really be said to have something in common with a pair of sandals?
Utter nonsense!
ai is bad because it can't grasp abstractions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, as the current trend in AI research is to eschew abstractions and modeling (referred to as GOFAI - good old fashioned AI) in favor of neural nets and the like. Adherents of embodiment look at chess as exactly the sort of problem stacks the deck in favor of the machines / can't tell us anything interesting about intelligence ...
Of course, chess is always solvable with sufficient computing power. There's really nothing interesting about it, just an optimized adversarial search tree with some functi
Re:ai is bad because it can't grasp abstractions? (Score:1)
I've seen so many lame ass architectures defined as "neural nets" in the past few years it's hilarious. Effectively any loosely coupled network is a "neural net" to the marketecture guys!
A computer program to manage a baseball game would be pretty inte
Chess vs. the game of Go (Score:5, Informative)
Those more interested in the aspects of computers and brute-force calculating power vs. human intuition in games like chess might find this article [denbeste.nu] interesting.
The author predicts that while computers will one day defeat even the greatest chess Grand Masters, they will probably never be able to master the Chinese game of "Go".
Re:Chess vs. the game of Go (Score:3, Informative)
it is a far more difficult problem to solve given its exponentially larger number of possibilities, but its true difficulty lies in the issues surrounding pattern recognition. It will be decades before a computer can compete with even a strong amateur, let along a professional strength player.
More go sites to check out:
http://gobase.org
http://go4go.net
http://www . kiseido.com
-yuf
Re:Chess vs. the game of Go (Score:1)
That explains it. (Score:3, Funny)
The article could have been interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the game to be not only fun but also rife with philosophical implications. It reinforces certain lessons of everyday philosophy, for instance the importance of trying hard (my games vary widely in quality, depending on effort and attention) and maintaining some humility (just when I think I've gotten good, someone comes along and wipes the board with me).
But then he goes on to make a discussion about platonism that could IMHO be made much better (and would be more interesting) in relation to mathematics.
It hapens that I have just (about two hours ago) written a short essay [xmp.net] on how to improve in another board game. What I didn't dare saying there is that you cannot seriously improve in go without trying to improve get an overall positive attitude towards life, somehow trying to be on top of it.
I would certainly have loved to see a chess player's take on that topic. Chess is probably still a little more competitive than go (in the Western culture), and they might well know more about it than we go players do.
Interesting issue not covered in detail (Score:4, Interesting)
Daniel Dennett's evocation of chess computers in his argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
I find it far more interesting than the two the article DOES cover, i.e. whether ideal objects exist and whether computers will out-think humans.
If this comment has any particular point, it's that there are many interesting questions that are probably NOT covered by this article, and this might be an interesting forum to bring some of them up.
The Article (Score:2, Funny)
This is stupid (Score:1)
1. This is high-school grade philosophy
2. Platonism deals with this; you could create a potentially infinite number of chairs and none would match the original, ideal chair, but would be reflections of it on this plane.
3. WTF does this have to do with AI? Jus
Re:This is stupid (Score:2, Funny)
Actually that's pretty good by slashdot standards.
Combined human+computer intelligence (Score:5, Interesting)
Chess is also an interesting test case for one of Vinge's paths to superhuman intelligence. [caltech.edu] Namely, the idea that human/machine interfaces may become so intimate that we will in effect fuse with our technology, becoming superhuman in capability.
Kasparov, for example, has been advocating allowing mixed human/computer teams in "Advanced Chess" [chessbase.com] tournaments. It seems that the human/machine combination, with the right interface, yields far better chess play than either alone.
Some questions that fascinate me:
Frankly I find these more useful questions than the old human vs. computer debate.
Poker, BlackJack, etc. (Score:2)
Nick Powers
chess ... not that interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Chess is essentially a math problem. "Real world" problems however are a completely different ball game. We need to answer some very interesting and fundamental questions before we can even begin to build any interesting A.I. (A theory of relevance [sperber.com] being one, and the frame problem [wikipedia.org] being another).
Re:chess ... not that interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
It's interesting that the article mentions variations on the game. One could imagine some meta-language to describe the rules and then a meta-chess solver to validate games... Hmm, but then you couldn't really say everything you wanted to about the system. It would be, heh, Incomplete.
platonic form (Score:1)
The young Russian Grandmaster, Kosteniuk [kosteniuk.com], is much more exciting.
Limitations: Chess is a Closed System (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, chess is closed - a King will always be limited to moving one square in any direction. With chess, no new moves, new pieces, new board locations can ever appear. Chess is also certain -- there are no ambiguites in the locations of the pieces. With chess the rules and positions are fully known before hand by the exactly two players who adhere to the constraints of the game.
By contrast, the field of human affairs evolves continuously to create new scenarios, new possible movements, new roles, and new players. Everyday slashdot has articles about the novel activities of people (from scammers using TTY relays [slashdot.org] to new chipsets [slashdot.org] to new laws [slashdot.org]). I would argue that decision making under conditions that are uncertain, open-ended, massively multiplayer, and subject to changes in the rules are a bit different.
They say one must learn to crawl before learning to walk. In some ways, learning about the intelligence required to play chess is like learning to crawl. That even the decision making underpinnings of playing chess is so hard to understand says something about how hard it will be to understand true intelligence in open-ended situations the poeple deal with every day.
Re:Limitations: Chess is a Closed System (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that these new situations and different rules really don't change anything about the way you handle situations. Basically everything in life is just a series of much smaller problems, requiring a finite number of operations. You just have to make a bunch of smaller decisions to handle that one big "new" experience. If we could teach co
Re:Limitations: Chess is a Closed System (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, no. Real world situations tend to have nasty nonlinear coupling -- you hit a decompostional limit that forces to either deal with the whole big system, make assumptions that discard parts of the problem, or use iterative approaches that may not converge. For example the N-body gravity problem cannot be accurately reduced to a set of 2-body problems. The fact that so many human decision
Re:Limitations: Chess is a Closed System (Score:3, Interesting)
I certinaly didn't want to make it sound easy. That is why I said _if_ we could teach computers the basics. Obviously discovering just what the "basics" are and getting a computer to work by those rules would be very difficult, but ultimatly I'd think it would work.
As for the problem of decompositional limits, making assumptions, etc... This is what humans do all the time. We break things down until we can understand. If we can't break it down enough we make (sometimes radica
Re:Limitations: Chess is a Closed System (Score:2)
Actually, you and I agree on this, sorry if my responding post seemed like an attack. The point of my orginal post was to mark the vast difference between chess and the real world. Thus, a deeper understanding of chess may not actually be as useful as we think because chess lacks so many of the features that makes real-world decision making so hard.
Obviously discovering just what the "basics"
Tip for good reading in metaphysics (Score:1, Interesting)
But my reason for posting was to point him, if he reads this reply, towards a writer he'll find very interesting. The philosopher John William Miller has a series of quite readable, philosophically acute books in which he presents the existence of universals in human ex
other worlds (Score:2, Informative)
The articles grasp of philosophy is suboptimal.
RS
ummm... (Score:1, Informative)
I'll leave you to use the google.
If I remember right...
possable worlds end up being sets of true/false values for logical propositions. Actually they end up being the infinite set of what the actual true/false value of all the possible (logically possible) propositions actually are.
And since sets for different possible worlds may(must? any logicians out there?) differ. Any imperical knowledge has nothing to do with proving
or disproving possible worlds.
Wh
Re:ummm... (Score:2)
I don't care about possible worlds or impossible worlds - it doesn't matter.
Any evidence you have for another world must be present in this world. Therefore, there is only this world. There is no other world. Possibility has nothing to do with it.
You need to read.
Now describe the universe : give three examples.
RS
Two Thoughts... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Two Thoughts... (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason that you can say two similar things exist is because they have obvious things in common which you can recognize. You use your SENSES to tell that they are similar, it's not purely some mental faculty.
For example, if I gave you two objects, and you had never seen something of that natural type before, you wouldn't be able to tell me they
Re:Justice? (Score:1)
Re:Two Thoughts... (Score:2)
Q.E.D. Most armchair philosophers are wankers.
cheese (Score:2, Funny)
Re:cheese (Score:1)
Retrograde analysis of chess positions (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are these programs considered A.I.? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't real AI be writing a program that plays a whole lot of chess and "learns" what makes a board/move good and that's how it decides how to play?
I just don't get why a computer playing exactly how it's programmed is considered AI and not learning anything on it's own (on its own is loose here, if it was specifically programmed to learn I'd still consider it learning on it's own).
For instance, we wrote a Kalah player in a CS class I was in. You know how my team decided how to rank boards, we wrote a program that cycled through thousands of possibilities for the different weightings of each pit and then compared the results when using those weightings. In my head, that's A.I., the computer just decided for itself what the best evaluation function was (albeit we told it how to decide) as opposed to simply using one we hard-coded in and having it search really deeply (which in my mind is not AI at all, just a computer playing a game).
A good quote to sum up the article (Score:5, Funny)
Don't want to flame, but the article does seem like a bunch of "pseudo-intellectual" (forgive me for using that phrase) 14 year olds sitting around, playing chess and thinking their minds are advanced. Half way through the article I thought they would break out matrix-like statements saying "there is no pawn."
Seriously, it just sounds like a half-assed book on Hume or such that somehow had pages of "Chess for Dummies" inserted randomly.
lame debates, I have the answer. (Score:2, Funny)
That is one search. The correct answer is 42.
Some Homework (Score:1)
games of no chance (Score:1, Interesting)
check out this MSRI [msri.org] Publication for an interesting discussion on {\em Games of no Chance}. These are games where $2$ players alternatively play and each has complete information. Also the game is bound to terminate with the winner being the last person to move. Chess also falls under this category, as do many other interesting combinatorial and topological games like Go, Ko, Checkers etc. While some like Checkers have been tamed, others like Chess or Go refuse to give up.
\end{blah}
Go karma
Philosophy 101? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did the Ruy Lopez exist before its 16th-century namesake started playing it? A Platonist might say it did, as part of an abstract set of all possible chess openings. But chess itself has a finite history. The game originated around the seventh century A.D., and its modern rules became standard in the 15th century, not long before Ruy Lopez de Segura was playing. Platonic ideals are normally defined as timeless, yet in this case they seem also to be historically grounded. The world of abstractions seems to depend on our world.
Does that mean that the number Pi didn't exist before it was discovered? It did, Platonism as he refers to in this article at least, is just stating that fact that that number although not defined (hence taken a particular meaning for us humans) has always existed.
Saying that Pi didn't exist before we noticed it is equivalent to saying that the outter most particles in the universe, the ones propelled by the big bang, don't exist since there's no way for us to reach them (they are moving at the speed of light outward).
Perhaps in some sense, all chess moves, positions and games are "out there," but they have a rather limited existence if nobody plays them. Interestingly, it appears physically impossible for any computer or other material entity ever to store complete information about the game. By some estimates, the number of possible chess games exceeds the number of particles in the universe.
Here's one, the number of different pathways a neural signal can take through the brain is WAY higher than the number of particles in the universe... does that mean we can't form some of these because nobody would be able to count them?
Both of these paragraphs don't add anything to the text, IMHO.
Anyone care to tell me otherwise in a logical manner?
Re:Philosophy 101? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exist(1) would mean something like "to have material extent", assuming that those words could be sufficiently defined. In that sense, particles "exist".
Exist(2) would mean -- to a Platonist -- "to be a form", which might or might not involve material extent; Plato was fuzzy on that point.
The problem is now to define precisely what it means to be a form. We certainly use forms in our thoughts all the time
Re:Philosophy 101? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think Platonists claim that, I think the claim is that ideas exist before-hand, and are mapped into the universe. When you say 'underlying abstract structure', it somehow implies that there is only one 'set' of ideas which are all structurally linked which guide the universe... I disagree with that in that there could be an infinite number of ideas, which form an infinite number of disjoint sets of struct
Re:Philosophy 101? (Score:2)
So
Chess again.. (Score:2)
Maybe chess isn't important (Score:2)
Chess is beginning to look like that. It yields to brute force. And by modern computational standards, not very much brute force. "Deep Fritz" [chessbase.com] tied 2:2 with Kasparov running on a desktop 4-processor IA-32 machine. Kasparov sa
Re: Take out the enemy queen first, your chance of (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Here's the text (Score:2)
Franly I don't give two hoots if they want to repeat it. I've got plenty of karma to burn but I don't intend to abuse mod points.