Garry Kasparov defeats Alan Turing in chess in 15 moves

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8283

by lathamcity • 14 years ago

103 23 14 years ago

chessbase.com

excuse-me• 14 years ago

Thus proving Turing is human - unless of course that's what it wants you to think !

dennisgorelik• 14 years ago

It was also fun to watch how much better Kasparov is than me at that speed (~5 seconds per move).

medusa666• 14 years ago

Will that man please either return to playing serious chess or (better) go away and stop his attention-whoring!?

sp332• 14 years ago

The dude is a legit national hero. He ran for president in 2008!

lathamcity3• 14 years ago

He didn't get any significant support.

btilly2• 14 years ago

He's seriously deluded. He believes that volumes of historical writings, C-14 dating, etc notwithstanding, that about a thousand years of recorded history never happened. Largely on the basis of the fact that the exponential population growth Europe has had since the British Agricultural revolution, if projected backwards in time, would say that there wouldn't have been as many people in Rome as there were.

Even a cursory understanding of, say, the trials our ancestors went through in the 1300s makes it obvious that he's wrong to project back his little exponential curve that far.

See http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.htm for details of Kasparov's beliefs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography for basic historical facts that show some basic flaws in Kasparov's arguments. (About his points on Roman numerals, they are indeed entirely unsuited to calculation. The Romans did all calculations using abacuses, numerals were just their way of writing down the answers for which purpose they are just fine.)

basugasubaku• 14 years ago

They set the machine to play at 2-ply, i.e., it only looks two moves ahead. It's not so surprising even a good algorithm would lose in 15 moves at 2-ply.

The article mentions they also played at 5-ply and it lasted 27 and 30 moves against Kasparov, which is probably better than most casual players would do.

peeters• 14 years ago

I do think this was a reasonable choice for the presentation because as I understand it, that's what Turing would have used when working it out with pencil and paper (and as they said, even that would take 15 minute between turns). 5-ply probably would have taken on the order of weeks or months to calculate the next move by hand.

raldi• 14 years ago

Is there a summary of Turing's algorithm somewhere?

folktheory• 14 years ago

I'm guessing it generates the tree (2 levels deep) and then uses an evaluation function to choose the best branch.

Not too far off from a modern algorithm, except that it lacks even basic optimizations like alpha-beta pruning, etc. and an incredibly fine-tuned evaluation function and a huge library of opening and closing moves.

cduan• 14 years ago

Here is one summary I found:

http://uscfsales.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/an-“easy”-engine-f...

djt• 14 years ago

humans can look 5-8 moves ahead with practice. GM's can probably look 15 or so moves ahead as well as study tactics of regular positions such as openings.

starpilot• 14 years ago

> Human grandmasters don’t work that way. They do not necessarily “see” the game several moves out. Indeed, they can’t — as Kasparov points out, chess is so complex that “a player looking eight moves ahead [faces] as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy.”... “As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees,” as Kasparov concludes, the real answer is: “Just one, the best one.” http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2010/02/why_cy...

philh• 14 years ago

There's something I don't understand about this. My impression is that grandmasters don't play quickly (against each other). I'd be surprised if it was uncommon to spend more than five minutes on a move, for example.

So what takes so long? I assume their process is roughly "consider all possible moves, decide how good they are". So if they only look one move ahead, that sounds to me like when they evaluate a potential position, it can take more than a few seconds and they do it without reading possible future moves. Which seems unlikely.

Am I misinterpreting "one move ahead"?

Garry Kasparov defeats Alan Turing in chess in 15 moves

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