Chess genius Bobby Fischer once tried to popularize his own version of his game. It replaced the standard starting arrangement of pieces with a randomized back row, making the players’ knowledge of the standard opening plays irrelevant. Fischer was reacting against the trend towards increasing memorization of lines to play among the chess elite; his version of the game would force the players to rely instead on their innate talent.
I think he felt that if one plays moves according to the “book”, one isn’t really playing a game so much as participating in a mechanical process that might as well be automated. Of course, playing chess has increasingly been automated—culminating in the famous Kasparov vs. Deep Blue series in which the super computer defeated the super human. Computers typically don’t play chess openings well, and so Deep Blue employed a “book” of many many game openings, and chose moves from that. Deep Blue, in other words, was playing “from memory”, exactly what Fischer didn’t like human players doing.
I was talking about computer game playing with a chess-playing friend and he remarked that against machines, one plays “anti-computer moves”—that is, unconventional plays that will force the computer to abandon its “book” early and switch to heavy calculations instead. This is what Kasparov tried to do in ‘96: force the computer off its script as early as possible.
It’s probably a good thing that Fischer played chess and not checkers. For a number of years, a checkers program by Jonathan Schaeffer from the University of Alberta has been better than the best humans. That program, while essentially unbeatable, was not actually perfect. It is now, though.
I read today that checkers has been “solved”. Schaeffer and his group have crunched the numbers, played out every possible avenue, and have proved that it is always possible to force a draw. You can only win at checkers if your opponent makes a mistake. What’s more, they’ve saved this information in a giant database, which you can “play” against (but never can you win).
It turns out playing checkers doesn’t have much to do with checkers: instead it’s a problem of searching a huge database.
The question I find myself pondering: is checkers any fun anymore? It’s certainly not much fun to play against Schaeffer’s program, but what about against another human?
There are something like 10^20 possible checkers positions. As the human brain only has around 10^11 neurons, it’s a fairly safe bet that no human will ever memorize their way to perfect play. Still, does knowing that, at every juncture, a perfect move has already been found and recorded in a database ruin the game? The checkers player can no longer aspire to invent a perfect game, he can only rediscover what has already been written.
I wonder how long until someone solves Chess…
“It turns out playing checkers doesn’t have much to do with checkers: instead it’s a problem of searching a huge database.”
as i look at this, a computer doesn’t really play checkers. it does something which resembles checker playing, even to the extent that a human could play checkers against a computer sorta playing checkers, but it just reminds me once again of the differences between the computer and real worlds.
i’d say that there is still a future for checkers, partly in trying to get a computer to think about checkers in a more human way. i bet you as a student of AI has a thing or two in the back of yoir head about computer logic and how it differs from our own…
“as i look at this, a computer doesn’t really play checkers. it does something which resembles checker playing”
I’ll do you one better: Wittgenstein said that computers don’t even really do calculations, they only appear to. That “appearance” is key though: what the computer does gains the status of “a calculation” once the result is interpreted by a human.
Numbers, (and checkers moves), don’t actually mean anything to the computer, after all.