Re: Guessing?

On Jul 14, 6:53 pm, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
> JOG wrote:
> > On Jul 14, 5:45 pm, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>On Jul 13, 9:07 am, JOG <j..._at_cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >>>>>The greatest weakness in the entire debate, however,
> >>>>>is the capacity issue. Lack of computing capacity is
> >>>>>a complete explanation for what computers can't do (yet.)
>
> >>><splutter/>
>
> >>>Ok, this one is just ridiculous. Lets take the bastion of good old
> >>>fashioned AI - chess. In the 90's the chess AI "deep blue" was
> >>>processing over 200 million board positions a second. That's right.
> >>>200 millions every single second. Let's compare that to a grand
> >>>master, who can examine about 8. Yup, that's 199,999,992 less
> >>>positions per second than the AI.
>
> >>Hey! You've been complaining about the other side's simplistic
> >>analyses, but here you're doing exactly the same thing. Deep
> >>Blue included special purpose hardware for playing chess, as
> >>well as dozens of general purpose CPUs. And you're claiming
> >>it's looking at 25 million times as many positions per second.
> >>Yet, Deep Blue lost to Kasparov, and Deeper Blue only just
> >>managed to eke out a victory. So, the 25 million number is
> >>crap, isn't it?
>
> > C'monnnn, its incredible. Examining 8 positions per second vs 200
> > million.
>
> I question your assertion. Perhaps consciously considering 8 positions
> per second, but obviously processing orders of magnitude more positions
> unconsciously.

There is nothing obvious about it, and as far as I know you are wrong to question it. Both amateurs and grandmasters are thought to consider (relatively) few moves, the advantage of the expert lying in memory, pattern recognition and generalization (specifically visual-spatial), not positions considered per second.

The question that should be asked therefore is how the grandmaster manages to ignore the millions of possibilities that the chess computer is too stupid to. Grandmasters don't have to process the other millions of board positions because they don't even consider them, period. I am happy to expand if you are interested even though its OT. Regards, J. Received on Mon Jul 14 2008 - 21:06:30 CEST