Chess grandmasters: Intelligent machines are about to revolutionize the world
post-gazette.com
post-gazette.com
What would be more impressive is a capped AI that can only look so many moves ahead and uses principles (such as say Nimzovich's opinionated twaddle) to win.
A lot of the other "Oh, that's just a cheap trick" non-AI things are a) much more useful to humans than the sci-fi notions people think of when they think AI and b) actually exist in the status quo. For example, if I told you that there exists a program which can make evidence-based judgments of a human's character to tell you whether they are likely to be trustworthy or not in their future business dealings, you would probably say "Egads! That is clearly AI! Holy cow, that is lightyears ahead of passing the Turing Test, and we're nowhere near passing the Turing Test!"
But if I told you "The program is called a FICO score" then, pfft, that isn't AI, that's just clever math and good selection of data sources.
This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field. Telling the topic of a document by reading it and understanding what it is about? AI! Leveraging anchor text on the link graph to do the work for you? Boooooooring. Granted, billion dollar business boring but still boooooooooring.
"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field.
Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI researchers. It's kind of silly.
... in retrospect.
How is this fundamentally different from a human player contemplating the move and then 2 seconds later recalling Nimzovich, etc.?
Still, these days computer chess programs are probably better than most grand masters. I completely agree that that doesn't say much about AI though.
Reprogramming Deep Blue is like replacing Kasparov with Anand, halfway through the match.
It is interesting to have watched this attitude transmute over the years into a belief, typified in this piece, that such technology will so revolutionize the world as to work some great deliverance in the human condition.
Back in the day, those who criticized the "Machine" would glorify the artisans and revel in the idea of human creativity in its pure form (unaided by advanced tools of any kind). The attitude was almost anti-science and was in any event highly "humanistic."
Now creativity and technology appear to be closely coupled in the eyes of young people in academic settings, to the point where information technology, at least, is seen as having almost redemptive qualities.
Not saying any of this is profound - just wondering if others have observed this changed perception as well or have thoughts on how it might have come about. Is it because technology became "personal" as opposed to "corporate"?
By the way, don't play Fritz as a chess adversary - it is like playing a demon from hell!
It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it. Younger people today seem to have completely abandoned the idea that they might have a private life and that privacy might have great value to themselves and others.
The noble savage and artisan view of humanity has changed into a view that we're all mostly just interchangeable nodes on the world network.
We have become the very machines that we once so hated.
That's a really good observation. People who are below a certain age don't have much perspective on
a) how mundane most information in FBI files always has been,
and
b) how much more pervasively personal information about most people is now shared by computerized networks than it was shared by small town gossip.
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¹ Kilometrage?
(The article appears to show only his personal view, not that of others)
What I find interesting is that even though I get crushed by both, it's very easy for me to tell the difference between a 1d human and a 1d computer. I sometimes wonder if it would be informative to try to build a weak Go AI that gets mistaken for a weak human player.
"Real AI" is a long way off; my definition: ability for systems to learn from their environment (physical or Internet), change their internal models, and generally evolve their own abilities without requiring external help.
Off topic: I have never met grandmaster Rogoff, but I watched my friend Carl Wagner play him in a telephone San Diego vs. Boston match in 1975. My company SAIC hosted the San Diego end of the match, and I was very surprised to see my friend Carl playing number 1 board: Carl had been clobbering me at chess during lunch time for months and I was just about ready to give up the game since I had a long loosing streak, and I am a poor loser. So, Carl was an international master, and never mentioned it :-)