Off On A Tangent

It appears the time when computers will begin beating humans at Go is coming.  The solution to this “problem” is to create better games.  Chess is failing.  Even without computers, chess at the highest level is being victimized by its own success.  As more and more people play it at higher and higher levels of play, the opening play of the game is slowly being “solved”.  There are too many openings that simply aren’t playable at the highest levels, because they inevitably lead to inferior positions, provided the opponent knows how, and these days, the grandmasters have studied thoroughly enough to know how.  Computer now being mostly unbeatable only worsens the situation.  How long can we keep playing such a game with some sense of satisfaction, knowing that nearly any box of metal with some very stupid set of rules can play it better?

What we need to do is improve our games to keep pace. Go is still beyond the ken of computer simply because of its size.  But, as computers get faster, this will no longer be an obstacle.  There is nothing special about Go that makes it a more difficult problem than Chess, except it’s sheer size.  But, computers continue to get faster, and new techniques continue to be developed.  Eventually, Go will fall.

So, what if we created new games that upped the ante?  Create new games that increase the search space without increasing the complexity beyond what humans can handle?  Humans seem to handle different search space sizes the same way.  We simply apply more pattern-matching skill to the situation.  For instance, in tic-tac-toe, we can brute force the solution ourselves, and so we do when playing it.  In chess, we can brute force to some degree, but not enough, and so we use more pattern-matching ability to play it effectively.  In Go, we can brute force very little, and so rely almost exclusively on pattern-matching.  A bigger game doesn’t change this - we still won’t be brute forcing it, and so it makes no difference to us.

Further improvements can also come from the introduction of minor elements of chance.  Just enough to destroy the deterministic quality of a game can severely hamper the computer’s ability to brute force a solution.

The advantages of embracing this games arms’s race are twofold: A) We get better games to play and B) AI developers get better problems to tackle.  It’s win-win (but let’s not tell the game players that).

Been a while since I blogged. I typically come home touting my laptop only to put it away and not even consider getting it out, plugged in, turned on, booted up, connected to the wireless (which hasn’t been working well lately for whatever reason), etc. Sitting there with a hot laptop on my lap, reading text with bright white backgrounds just isn’t appealing enough to go through all that.

Anyway, I joined a chess league at the Rochester Chess Center a few weeks back and have played twice so far. Won both my games, but that is because I got stuck on 3rd board for my team. Each team has 4 players, ordered from best to worst according to USCF rating, and just the way things worked out, I was third on my team. My old USCF chess rating was 1705. At the time - 12 years ago, I was playing at a level probably roughly around 2050, but keeping my rating low so as to compete in the New York Open, which has large prizes, even if you play in the under 1800 section (ie $6,000 for first place down to $400 for 20th place). The first time I played I got into the top 20, but I was surprised at how many other people like me there were - ie, experts and masters with super low ratings.

After 12 years of not playing, my playing strength is probably fairly accurately described by my 1705 rating. The next highest rated person on 3rd board is 200 points below that, and the next highest after that is another 200 points below that. I was never one to lose to opponents rated below me, so the fact that I’ve won my first two rated games in 12 years isn’t that surprising. It’s a very gentle re-acquaintance with tournament chess.
I’m having a blast and really getting back into chess. In my own view, I feel like I’m playing very badly. I’m hopeful I’ll get better quickly, but I’m not sure I will. When I was younger, I played with a lot of reckless abandon - always wanted to be attacking, never learning much of opening theory and generally being helpless in endgame play. But very dangerous in the middle game. On the one hand, I like to think of myself as an aggressive, attacking player, but on the other hand, I want to learn chess more deeply. In paying attention to how I play, I find that what I am good at is visualizing. It isn’t any great difficulty for me to visualize positions 3, 4, 5, 6, x number of moves deep. It doesn’t really matter how far - I can keep the positions straight in my head without difficulty. But, I miss a lot of moves - meaning I don’t even consider a lot of moves that are actually good or important moves. And so my problem actually seems to be one of imagination. I need to broaden my search - I have no trouble with depth. But that feels more difficult to improve upon than improving visualization skills.

I also have a lot of fun imagining teaching Jaime to play chess, and getting him excited about the game. Taking him to the chess center and letting him loose there with all the other kids. Teaching chess holds great interest for me. I think it could be a lot of fun to be a chess coach.

• Domination-positive - Games where winning leads to winning. Chess and Stratego are example domination games because the side with the advantage usually is able to leverage the advantage to create more advantages. Most wargames, games where opposing player pieces are “eliminated” are domination games.
• Domination-neutral - Games where winning creates no leverage for increasing the advantage of the winning side. Many sports are like this - ie, leading in scoring creates no inherent advantage in future scoring.
• Domination-limiting - Games where winning leads to losing, or where taking a lead makes it difficult to progress to winning. Sorry, Aggravation, Parchesi and many multi-player games are like this, where as you start taking a lead toward winning, your continued progress to finish off the win becomes more and more difficult, often allowing come-from-behind victories to be the norm.

Obviously, this is only one of many ways to categorize games. Why I’ve made this division will hopefully become clear in future blogs.