Re: Guessing?

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:30:06 -0300
Message-ID: <487bb74e$0$4030$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>


JOG wrote:

> 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.

But those are just ways to consider many positions 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.

Again, I question your assertion.

  I am happy to expand if you are interested even though
> its OT. Regards, J.

Sure. But how do you establish that the brain isn't doing processing unconsciously? Received on Mon Jul 14 2008 - 22:30:06 CEST

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