How to teach a Bayesian spam filter to play chess

http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess-1.html

26 33 19 years ago

dbacl.sourceforge.net

pixcavator14• 19 years ago

How about teaching it how to do ADDITION?

This would be a better experiment because (1) it is simpler and faster, (2) the feedback is unambiguous, (3) the ability to add is verifiable.

Essentially you supply it with all sums of all pairs of numbers from 0 to 99 and then see if it can compute 100+100.

zyroth4• 19 years ago

Bayesian classification works a bit like this: You have a set of inputs and a set of targets. By having seen a history of elements of the powerset of inputs and its manually tagged classes, the bayesian classificator learns how to classify new elements of the powerset of inputs.

Thus, a bayesian classifier has to know the classes and the inputs before. It cannot extrapolate from the sets it was trained on, since the bayesian approach does not see numbers as something that some operations are defined on, but only as symbols.

A simple backprop neural network can learn addition, though.

pixcavator14• 19 years ago

Are you saying that a neural network can learn addition symbolically? Can you recommend a book or site to read about this?

zandorg• 19 years ago

On a random note, I was first introduced to Paul Graham's writings by his article on the Bayesian spam filter he wrote.

npk• 19 years ago

On another random note, was anyone else dissapointed when they found out that a neural net is a fancy way of drawing a line through some points. i.e. regression.

pixcavator14• 19 years ago

I was mostly relieved. I wasn't insane after all. Some problems are simple, some hard, and some can't be solved. These approaches are very indirect and people may be tempted to use them without first asking the question: can this problem be solved (in principle!) with the data that we have?

leecs1• 18 years ago

If chess playing is a matter of classification (ignoring the complexity of input vector encoding and computational feasibility), then Bayesian filter can surely achieve this goal.

How to teach a Bayesian spam filter to play chess

Related Stories