![]() “There is no way chess can be solved with modern technology. If the machine whopped the man back when Intel Pentium IIs first hit the market, AI must now be close to solving the game, right? Chess is an avalanche of digits fit for a computer, and in 1997, Deep Blue defeated Russian grand master Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. Chess uses all 64 squares on the board, where checkers uses half as many. Each type of chess piece may move a particular direction and distance, where checkers differentiates solely between regular and kinged pieces. Where Watson must understand human language, chess is written in the computer’s mother tongue-math and probability.īut chess is a complex game to master, even for a machine. Watson gets compared to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing program, but in many ways, they couldn’t be more different. The algorithms cut down the number of positions that Chinook needed to examine from 10 ^20 to 10 ^14, allowing Schaeffer finally to complete the work in 2007. ![]() So his team sought a shortcut, turning to better algorithms to sort through the positions, rather than waiting around for a next-generation supercomputer to land in their laps. Checkers has about 5 x 10 ^20 possible positions, and Schaeffer knew that the machine would not be able to finish the computation with sheer brute power within his lifetime. If you need a yardstick by which to measure the complexity of checkers, consider that 13 years passed between the second Tinsley championship match-when Chinook took on the man Schaeffer described as “as close to perfection as you could imagine in a human” and played him to a standstill-and Schaeffer’s grand victory over the game itself, when Chinook became able to calculate every possible series of moves from every possible position. He was ailing, and died the following year. The man won his first high-profile match against the machine in 1992, but by their second world championship bout, it looked like a real contest: They played six games, fighting each other to a draw each time. Considered by some the greatest player of all time, Tinsley lost only three competitive games between 19 among the thousands he played, Schaeffer says. Years before Deep Blue faced off against chess master Garry Kasparov, Schaeffer’s Chinook program matched wits with checkers master Marion Tinsley. Jonathan Schaeffer, a University of Alberta professor who helped create a poker-playing AI, has worked since 1989 to design a checkers champion. You lose.īut what happens when the board gets bigger and the rules more complex?Ĭheckers, played with pieces that move and interact on a larger 8-by-8-inch board, presents a much greater computing challenge. As a result, tic-tac-toe and Connect Four fall into the category of solved games. Most importantly, a computer can do what a child cannot: simulate every possible outcome and choose the perfect move. There’s no hidden info or luck involved in tic-tac-toe, Massey writes in his notes on AI and games. This simplicity makes these kids’ games, which humans tend to tire of as they grow older. Tic-tac-toe and Connect Four have small, two-dimensional playing areas, and the rules are simple: Players take turns in an attempt to place three or four marks in a row, while preventing an opponent from doing the same. ![]() Watson may have triumphed, but computers still lag behind the best human players in many of our favorite games. ![]() The history of competitive computers is the history of overestimating the rise of the machines and underestimating the strength of the human brain. Checkers, chess, Scrabble, bridge, backgammon, poker, Stratego, and more-software designers are scrambling to create systems to crack each one. Does that make Jeopardy! a machine’s greatest gaming challenge? Not quite, says ai (artificial intelligence) researcher and computer science professor Bart Massey of Portland State University in Oregon. IBM’s megacomputer, Watson, creamed the hominid competition at the quirky, punny, idiosyncratic Jeopardy! This contest, calling on such skills as language, grammar, and wordplay, is among the most human of games-much more so than the mathematical system of chess, which IBM’s Deep Blue mastered in the 1990s. Last year the machines finally beat us at our own game.
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