If machines can beat us at games, does it make them more ?

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

Correct me if I'm wrong but most chess programs don't use brute force, even Deep Blue wasn't brute force. Selective search techniques have been used for many decades.

Define brute force...

Deep Blue was full width plus selective extensions. If we equate brute force with Shannon's Type A Strategy, then Deep Blue was brute force.

Of course Deep Blue did use a transposition table, so it too would have solved the test position in a fraction of a second.

Even modern chess engines are mostly intended to be brute force in the sense that they (eventually) enumerate all possible solution candidates. They are just a lot better at looking at more promising lines earlier than the engines of the past.

I would not agree here with Ronald.

for me, a brute-force searcher implies a branching factor bigger than 10, at least.

as far as I know, modern top engines exhibit much lower BFs.

in that sense, I guess they are more wise than brute-force.


In any case, any sophistication of the code, adding more lines, would generally suppose an engine that is less of a brute-searcher, and modern top engines seem in general to add more sophistication in their codes than otherwise.

[Dann Corbit]

Pure alpha-beta should be considered brute force, because it provably finds every solution at depth identical to mini-max.

With optimal move ordering, BF is 6.

[hgm]

Note that Fairy-Max' search is pretty much fixed-depth, by the time it is down to a Pawn ending. Null move, LMR and check extension will all be switched off. So there is only QS, and there isn't much to capture. Still it finds the correct plan (creeping behind the Pawns through the a-file) in 0.33 sec, which is probably faster than 'human intuition' would need, when presented the position without prior history.

So this isn't about brute force vs selectivity. Transposition Table is what does the trick.

[Isaac]

Even modern chess engines are mostly intended to be brute force in the sense that they (eventually) enumerate all possible solution candidates. They are just a lot better at looking at more promising lines earlier than the engines of the past.

I did not know that. I thought that there was a maximum depth from which modern engines stopped to search, preventing them to enumerate all possible solution candidates.

[Kirk]

https://blog.csiro.au/machines-can-beat ... ligent-us/

I read this book last year. The problem of the "Singularity" is more complex than we think

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J3VRPQY/re ... TF8&btkr=1

[syzygy]

Even modern chess engines are mostly intended to be brute force in the sense that they (eventually) enumerate all possible solution candidates. They are just a lot better at looking at more promising lines earlier than the engines of the past.

I did not know that. I thought that there was a maximum depth from which modern engines stopped to search, preventing them to enumerate all possible solution candidates.

True, most programs have a hardcoded maximum depth, but if we take that into account even a full-width searcher would not qualify as "brute force" since it won't search any line deeper than the maximum depth.

The main reason for limiting depth is that engines reserve a fixed number of bits in their TT entries for storing the depth at which a position was searched. Increasing max depth might reduce the number of entries that can be stored in a TT of a given size, but it would leave the engine's search algorithm intact.

[duncan]

I guess that if we keep going on the way we are, that computers would get the upper hand and take over.

do you mean like a frankenstein and take over its masters after aquiring consciousness ?

[Ras]

When a machine is capable of creating a human being without any outside help, we'll safely be able to say they're smarter than us.

Taking a look at the human reproduction process, I wouldn't say that it takes a lot of intelligence; in fact, IQ and reproduction rate are correlated strongly negatively.

[Ras]

The military seems to have overlooked Asimov's robot rules and are already building fully automated killing systems that can decide for themselves about targets.

The porn industry will come to rescue. Obviously, the combat value of a sexbot will be much lower than the one of a killbot, but the porn industry is geared towards private customers. That means they have to be cost efficient, unlike the military industry that just can suck up another billion of subsidiaries in the name of national security.

So, when we throw 200 sexbots at one killbot, what will happen is that the killbot will easily tear apart 50% of the sexbots and then drop out due to some technical problem.

Basically the same plot that the German Army experienced in WW2 when they had the ultimate tank in smallish numbers, the King Tiger - while the USSR had gazillions of T34s. The Tigers mostly were not destroyed, but had to be abandoned because they broke down.

[S.Taylor]

https://blog.csiro.au/machines-can-beat ... ligent-us/

This is the first time I open this thread.
Well, if a tree falls on to a person and breaks his back, does it make the tree more?
Well, let's see, if i fall on to a thick tree trumk and i don't break IT'S basck, so does that prove that the tree is more?

OK, so if I cannot memorize the whole of encyclopedia britanica, does that make encyclopedia britanica more?

How about a whole public library?

Or the whole of wikipedia?

hmm I'm getting a bit nervous now. So am I worth anything at all?

I'm not worth a skyscraper I'm not even worth an elephant in logevity let alone a book!

Yes, I think you're absolutely right!

We are NOT worth much!!!!

But we can complain to our creator about it. How about THAT?