On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 16:53 -0500, Don Dailey wrote:
> It's obvious that you can't program a 10 instruction per second
> computer to beat a human - so it's also clear that there would
> be some minimum level of hardware required.
Let's not forget VLIW ( Very Long Instruction Word ) computers,
or various parallel architectures such as the Connection Machine,
which operated on 64K bits at once. The instruction cycle time of a
human brain is somewhere around ten per second - but we do a
surprising amount of sophisticated processing nonetheless. It helps
to have 10^15 processors working in parallel.
> I could make a guess, but I certainly don't trust my intuition here.
> My guess is that God could program a core 2 duo system of today to
> beat a strong human.
There are limits to what a core 2 duo can compute in a reasonable
amount of time, no matter how sophisticated the program. So many
instructions per second, so many bits of change, so much information
gathered ... does this approach what a Meijin does with a large fraction
of 10^15 neurons all working in tandem?
Now that I think on it, with perfect knowledge, God could write
a compact opening book to handle the fuseki, and an engine which
would deal with the remainder of the game quite well. Trading data
storage for processing power could stretch the abilities of the core
duo quite a bit. Would it be enough? Of course, there's the approach
used by some www commerce sites - the "ask an authority" subroutine.
When the computer gets really stuck, it simply executes Prayer(board, "What's
the best move, God?") followed by Sacrifice(12*unblemished_lamb) or Rosary(50).
Hans Moravec estimated that processing power equivalent to a
human brain will be available around 2020 - probably at supercomputer
prices. Ten or twenty years after that, it will be available to the
average hobbyist.
Building a Go program to take advantage of hundreds of thousands
of processors and terabytes of RAM will be an interesting challenge.
God himself would surely be able, but are we? We're striving for the computer
equivalent of Kami no itte.
____________________________________________________________________________________
TV dinner still cooling?
Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV.
http://tv.yahoo.com/
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
