Garry Kasparov Reviews Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind

Here.

Comments

[Kenneth W. Regan]

From my standpoint as a computer-science researcher, Kasparov is spot-on. The only nit I can pick is I believe the # of legal positions is closer to Shannon's original estimate 10^43 than 10^40. I wholly agree with his statement that competitive chess should be viewed scientifically as an arena for understanding human thinking. I hope my ongoing quantitative work will make good on that.

Incidentally, this work is also supporting basically all his assertions about the nature and evolution of chess in his My Great Predecessors series.

[Kenneth W. Regan]

Let me add something specifically about this paragraph of Kasparov's review:

"Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors."

This paragraph mixes a technical statement about brute-force search as optimal for playing chess with several social statements. I agree with the last sentence, but can shed a different light on the ones before it by raising a scientific point of my professional field, which is computational complexity theory. There is actually a clash of two increasing strands of evidence. One is that for many classes of computational problems---including finding a winning line in a chess position when one exists, and hundreds of vital practical problems---there may exist no algorithm that is applicable in all cases and improves substantially on brute-force search. Indeed, we have adopted the Russian word perebor to mean brute-force search in this technical context. The other is that for some cases of these problems, often many cases or separate sets of cases, there are "idea-based" algorithms that work well on those cases. David S. Johnson and Richard M. Karp (an avid chess follower, USCF 1800-ish) are leaders of the latter strand.

If the former strand of evidence proves out, it will "tragically" be the norm in my field that brute-force-search is optimal, except for tuning, as a scientific fact. My field would then impute that this scientific fact is felt in all walks of life. Of course, my field has not proved anything remotely like this yet. And "tuning" is not a trivial issue---even in chess, Rybka is believed by some to employ novel ideas about quantifying near-term mobility and generating evaluations. Ultimately ideas have to compete, and in chess the grounds of competition are brutally clear...

[David McCarthy]

Is it so obvious that the ubiquity of brute-force-search would be "tragic"? It's at least worth asking whether our aesthetic sensibilities about problem solving aren't parochial, shaped more than we think by the only methods which have been available to us until recently. Take the four color theorem. Is this fact really any the less wonderful simply because its only known proof (as far as I know) is the application of computational brute-force? From a certain perspective the truth of the theorem seems even more wonderful given that in a sense it defies explanation.