Chess Terminator Robot Takes On Former World Champ 63
Zothecula writes with this excerpt from Gizmag: "For almost as long as we've had computers, humans have been trying to make ones that play chess. The most famous chess-playing computer of course is IBM's Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated the then World Champion Garry Kasparov. But as powerful as Deep Blue was, it didn't actually move the chess pieces on its own. Perhaps that's a trivial task in comparison to beating the best chess player of all time, but it's still exciting to discover this recent video of a chess robot that more closely fits the true definition of a chess automaton." My favorite part: "Note that around the 2:45 mark Kramnik extends his hand offering a draw, but the robot – since it's not fitted with any kind of optical device – just keeps playing, very nearly taking off Kramnik's hand in the process!"
Re:Frustrating (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting.
If a robot was better at my job than I could be, my solution would be to consider buying a robot....
Re:Deep blue cheated (Score:3, Insightful)
I never saw any evidence that the parameters were changed during games. In between games yes, which I don't see a problem with.
Kudos (Score:1, Insightful)
In fact, just finding and moving chess pieces around with a robot is orders of magnitude harder than playing the game of chess. We humans are just adapted towards these kinds of things (moving around in a 3D environment and manipulating objects) that it comes very easy to us, and we don't view it as a "hard" problem -- so when we see a game like chess, we think it is "hard" because we don't do it automatically. For a computer, which is well adapted for crunching numbers and doing logic, chess comes very naturally, while navigating a 3D environment and manipulating objects is not.
However, I can see that this robot is just a simple Denso manipulator without any perception, which makes the task significantly easier. But if you turned the chess board just 20 degrees to the right, it would utterly fail to continue playing chess, while the human would easily be able to adapt. Even if you provided sensors to the robot, that kind of change in its environment would be absurdly difficult for the robot to deal with.