I am very impressed about the performance of humans in chess compared to computer chess.
The computer steps through millions(!) of positions per second. And even if the best chess players say they only evaluate max 3 positions per second I am sure that this cannot be true because there are so many traps in chess which must be considered. I think humans represent chess by a huge number of *visual* patterns. The chessboard is 8x8 squares. Probably, a human considers all 2x2, 3x3 4x4 and even more subsets of the chessboard at once beside the possible moves. We see if a pawn is alone or if a knight is at the edge of the board. We see if the pawns are in a diagonal and much more. I would guess that the human brain observes many thousands of visual patterns in a single position. This is the only explanation for me why the best chess players still have a little chance to win against computers. Even a beginner who never has played chess would see some patterns in the initial position. All pieces with the same color are together at different sides. All pawns of the same color are in the same raw and so on. The interesting question is why the beginner can already see regularities. I think the human has a lot of visual bias which is also useful to see patterns in chess. On the other hand visual embodied experience is of course important too. In my opinion, sophisticated vision is much more important for an artificial human than natural language understanding -Matthias Von: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: Freitag, 24. Oktober 2008 01:53 An: agi@v2.listbox.com Betreff: Re: [agi] If your AGI can't learn to play chess it is no AGI Yeah, but these programs did not learn to play via playing other computer players or studying the rules of the game ... they use alpha-beta pruning combined with heuristic evaluation functions carefully crafted by human chess experts ... i.e. they are created based on human knowledge about playing human players... I do think that a sufficiently clever AGI should be able to learn to play chess very well based on just studying the rules. However, it's notable that **either no, or almost no, humans have ever done this** ... so it would require a quite high level of intelligence in this domain... ben g ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
