Chess Intuition and Computer AI

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/chess_intuition.php

by cwan • 17 years ago

36 26 17 years ago

dustingetz• 17 years ago

"The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace."

The same can be said about the young generation online poker pros of the last 5 years, who regularly decimate the old school pros who learned live poker first.

clevercode• 17 years ago

I wonder how much of this is simply due to poker's recent surge in popularity, thus creating a much larger pool of potential talent to draw from.

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

It would be nice if there more meat in the discussion of what intuition really is.

This is a truism of expertise. Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don't systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information.

References? Studies? It sounds very plausible but...

It would help if the one link the article wasn't inside a paywall too.

ludwig2• 17 years ago

The referenced paper on deliberate practice by Ericsson has been linked on HN many times before.

Here's a link I found on Google: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

lmkg4• 17 years ago

Hofstadter's book GEB talked about chess and intelligence a bit, and it mentioned some studies. There's one I most definitely remember. The study involved taking two groups of people, normal people and chess pros, showing them a chess board for like 5 seconds, and having them reconstruct as much of the board position as they could.

The normal people did exactly like you thought they would, placing a few pieces around, with a lot of off-by-one errors. The chess pros, on the other hand, got board positions comparatively "more wrong" than the beginners. Multiple pieces were radically moved across the board. However, when these board positions were looked at by other pros, the responses were almost universally along the lines of "well, the positions are different, but strategically they're actually kinda similar..."

It's qualitative feedback, to be sure, and difficult to verify and certainly not be trusted in a scientific sense. Nonetheless, it does reveal some of the "intuition" going on. Pro chess players are good at seeing high-level patterns in the positioning of the pieces, related to strategies and advantages and relative positioning. They see these things so well that they stop seeing the actual pieces, to an extent. It reminds me of that scene in the first Matrix movie where the one guy (Cypher?) is pointing to the screen with numbers trailing down, saying "I don't see the numbers anymore, it's just blonde, brunette, redhead, ..."

This seems to relate more to perception than to intuition as it's traditionally thought of, but I would argue that they two are more strongly coupled than most people realize. One type of intuition is perceiving emergent phenomena directly without noticing the underlying layers.

jerf2• 17 years ago

My memory isn't all that great, so I hate to go out on a limb here, but what I think was discussed in GEB was that if shown a sensible board layout that could be reached in real play, the pros could nail it in five seconds, whereas normal people could do only tolerably well in five seconds. Show the pros a nonsense board that could never come up in real play, and the normal people do the same as they did before, but the pros crash and burn. This is meant to show that the mental conception of a board is different between a pro and a novice.

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

I remember reading that study in GEB. It's kind of a big step from that to clarifying what "intuition" is, even, especially, if we feel we understand it easily.

pmiller2• 17 years ago

I don't think this thing called "intuition" is all that mysterious. It seems to me it's just a result of extensive training of the neural network we call carry underneath our hats. Study a lot of chess games, and you'll absorb a lot of chess knowledge, even if you can't output that knowledge in the form of a set of rules. Really, it reminds me a lot of how after a few years of foreign language study, a lot of the grammar rules one would learn in a first-year course fade away into the background and become more of a gestalt knowledge of basic language forms (which is really just a fancy-shmancy way of saying "you know what sounds right and what sounds wrong.")

ludwig2• 17 years ago

This piece stands in stark contrast with how computers are received in Go. Past the beginner level, you are discouraged from playing a computer player at all, lest you pick up bad habits that will hinder your progress later on.

Although, admittedly, this is because Go AI hasn't progressed to the level where it can defeat professionals at all, much less consistently. Once this happens, I can only begin to imagine the level that will be attained by some future kid with plenty of time to practice against such a formidable opponent.

dutchflyboy3• 17 years ago

Disclaimer: I don't play a lot of Go, I could be completely wrong.

That's probably due to the fact that in Go there are less intermidiary goals. In chess capturing a piece, defending a piece or simply making your position better by putting a bisshop on a diagonal can be seen as a step towards winning. Thus a chess AI doesn't need to go very deep before knowing which strategies are bad. For example, chess AI's written in JS often don't go much deeper than two steps ahead but still play quite decently.

But with Go you need to build chains made of several (often > 10) stones. And that sort of calculation is very heavy for brute-force style AI, which is about all a computer can resort to at this moment.

kd5bjo2• 17 years ago

I don't play a lot of chess, but it seems like there are more intermediate goals in go, but they're also more nebulous. Gaining center influence, threatening an opponent's weak group, cutting an opposing group into two groups, defending your own territory, making eyes, and reducing your opponent's territory are all important goals.

The best moves are ones that further two or more of these at the same time; it's very easy to lose if you're only concerned about one at a time.

kiba• 17 years ago

I have this sort of experience in programming as well.

For the whole 5 years of my programming hobby and career, I wrote primary in ruby(now, starting to do javascript), struggling with my own problem and bugs and generally learning how to write good code. I didn't think I was learning much, since I was doing this whole thing in ruby and rubygame.

It took a beginner programmer who asked for help to see the extent of my knowledge. From there, I efficiently dispatch each problems one by one, pointing out the simple errors that the newbie made. He was so thankful that he gave me 10 bucks.

Even so, I still felt that I wasn't so smart given the vast domain of knowledge that exists in programming and computer science. Surely, there is someone my age who is way smarter than me and programmed all sort of cool stuff. Surely there is someone who can code a tetris clone with unfathomable beauty.

I reckons that each programmer in the world only solve a fraction of the problem space in the area that they're interested in.

tdmackey• 17 years ago

Sadly the article over-exaggerates the amount of computer chess Magnus plays. Few grandmasters do. Chess software is good for analysis and study of the board but not so much for actually playing against. For direct quotations from Magnus regarding this issue see http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=2392166

sireat• 17 years ago

It is true, there are other aspects to Magnuss chess proficiency. Adgestein's coaching when Magnus was in his early teens, must have been a factor. It is hard for a teen with other pressures to transition from a promising player (with much hype one must add) into a real premier player.

Notice though, that Magnus mentions that he is not even sure where his real chess board is. His chess time is spent at the computer.

Personally, I have trouble playing on a regular board after playing tons of computer chess, but then again I am an old patzer(2400FIDE).

Chess Intuition and Computer AI

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