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!"
Deep blue cheated (Score:5, Interesting)
When Garry played Deep Blue, it was understood that no parameters of the machine would be changed during game play. That turned out not to be the case, as the IBM programmers were tweaking things behind the scenes.
Had Garry known this, he might have played differently, not expecting the machine to make new/different moves than it had previously made, etc.
Re:Deep blue cheated (Score:3, Interesting)
While it would certainly be more impressive for Deep Blue to beat Gasparov unaided, it's still pretty impressive to beat him even with the aid of a programmer, unless that programmer happens to be a chess champion himself :).
What do you meant by "new" moves? The same piece is unlikely to be in the same spot many times in a single match, so the majority of moves are inevitably going to be "new" in a given match.
Did you perhaps mean "strategies"?
Automation - the silent conquest (Score:5, Interesting)
I think when robots are better at my job than I could be, I would start to question the meaning of my life.
In the 1980s, there was an article in Chess Life: "Computer Chess - It's Getting Serious". This was when computers started playing chess well enough that grandmasters had to take them seriously. One strong player wrote "I'm starting to feel like John Henry against the steam hammer" [wikipedia.org]. Now it's happened. Any good desktop machine can be loaded up with software that plays at world champion level [rybkachess.com] for about $125. (If you haven't been on the cover of Chess Life, a laptop will be enough to trounce you.) People are still playing chess.
Work, though, is another matter. What's happening is the hollowing out of the middle class. There are more crap jobs that pay minimum wage, but fewer ones that pay more. Manufacturing used to pay well; now it pays slightly above minimum wage, if that. That's because the machines are doing the thinking. The workers are just robot hands with minimal skills.
Here's a very clear example of that - The Kiva robotic order fulfillment system. [youtube.com] Watch that video. Hundreds of cooperating mobile robots. All the thinking and planning is done by the computers. The workers just take things out of one tray and put them in a box. The computers even control a laser pointer to point to the object they're supposed to pick. Then a bar-code scanner checks that they did it right. "Requires little or no operator training". Zero opportunity for advancement.