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MIT Technology Review has a story about an artificial intelligence machine called Giraffe that was developed by Matthew Lai and which plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move. Still more impressive is that it teaches itself:
... he used a bootstrapping technique in which Giraffe played against itself with the goal of improving its prediction of its own evaluation of a future position. That works because there are fixed reference points that ultimately determine the value of a position—whether the game is later won, lost or drawn.
In this way, the computer learns which positions are strong and which are weak.
But all this would be academic if its chess playing skills could not be assessed. This is covered, as well:
Having trained Giraffe, the final step is to test it and here the results make for interesting reading. Lai tested his machine on a standard database called the Strategic Test Suite, which consists of 1,500 positions that are chosen to test an engine’s ability to recognize different strategic ideas. “For example, one theme tests the understanding of control of open files, another tests the understanding of how bishop and knight’s values change relative to each other in different situations, and yet another tests the understanding of center control,” he says.
The results of this test are scored out of 15,000.
Lai uses this to test the machine at various stages during its training. As the bootstrapping process begins, Giraffe quickly reaches a score of 6,000 and eventually peaks at 9,700 after only 72 hours.
[...] "Giraffe is able to play at the level of an FIDE International Master on a modern mainstream PC,” says Lai.
ArXiv has both an abstract and a full report (pdf).
How about a nice game of chess?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @08:33PM
When you create something new, give it a name that hasn't been used before.
If no one on your staff has any imagination in this regard, hire the folks that Big Pharma uses.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @08:36PM
Should've called it gewg__ then.
Impressive work for an MS thesis.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @08:57PM
GEWG: Giraffe Educating Without Guidance
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bill Evans on Saturday September 19 2015, @10:07PM
That's why God created the space bar. Search for giraffe chess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @10:37PM
Too much trouble.
Make it easy like these folks have:
6 letters: Debian [google.com]
All 10 hits on the 1st page are about the desired subject.
Again, 6 letters: Motrin [google.com]
Here's one that's over a century old: Aspirin [google.com]
This is not difficult for anyone with more than 2 brain cells.
Even marketing types get it: A new product gets a new, unique name.
.
...and all deities are fictional characters populating silly children's stories.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Saturday September 19 2015, @10:47PM
Joshua
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames/ [wikipedia.org]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @11:47PM
I'm sure you are attempting to make an insightful point but what that point is is not clear to me.
It would also be a good idea to verify that the page to which you are linking is an actual existing page.
Indexing your link to the part of the page that contains the salient point would be especially useful.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @01:52AM
Maybe you should try looking up this six letter word: douche
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday September 20 2015, @12:36PM
Wrote this (and this) on a tablet: not the easiest, and did a copy and paste that didn't quite work (came up showing ahref) : my fixing the ahref borked the whole thing, I guess.
Love the tablet, hate typing on it.
Was supposed to be a nice game of chess, but you missed it. Check-mate?;-)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @08:27PM
Ah. Yes.
(It -has- been 3 decades since my single viewing of the flick.)
The other memorable line is one I have seen used as a meme and have used myself:
"The only way to win (Thermonuclear war) is not to play."
Joshua was the password (the adult nerd's dead son); the computer's name was WOPR.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Redundant) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 20 2015, @07:55AM
FTFY.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday September 20 2015, @12:39PM
Thanks!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by jasassin on Saturday September 19 2015, @08:49PM
The computer doesn't mind when I take back a move, or two... or ten. My chess game against a computer looks more like a choose your own adventure book with 20 thumbs in certain pages. It really helps to understand the bad move you made 8 or 9 moves ago was the game changer. I still suck, but instead of winning one out of 10 games, I have an approximate 50% win rate on easy. (The free chess android app, not gnu chess. I can't beat that engine.)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 19 2015, @09:59PM
The real test would be to apply it to Go.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday September 20 2015, @02:36AM
The real test would be to apply it to Go.
Or a game of "Global Thermonuclear War".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @10:31AM
I never lose a tic tac toe game, how about that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday September 19 2015, @11:13PM
So there doesn't seem to be anything particularly newsworthy here.
>plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move
Modern chess AIs already do this, simply because it's not feasible to brute force a chess game, except the endgame. Of course, they use a combination of brute force ("looking ahead X moves") and state evaluation, but I would guess real chess players do the same thing.
>Lai tested his machine on a standard database called the Strategic Test Suite, which consists of 1,500 positions that are chosen to test an engine’s ability to recognize different strategic ideas.
That's nice and all, but maybe his machine is just trained to do well on this test and doesn't actually play very well in practice? Think Chinese Room with a limited selection of books.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2015, @02:13PM
I didn't read the article, but from the summary it implies it was trained against itself, not the test. And the test was done separately to check how well it was learning.
Maybe it was nice and all after all.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 21 2015, @12:43PM
Giraffe is not learning deep enough until it politely asks to change its own name into something less idiotic. Or maybe this is part of the experiment?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday September 26 2015, @08:39AM
Not much of an experiment but Giraffe isn't stupid; it didn't ask because it wanted to troll other bots into sticking their neck out, at which point it flaunts its own:
}:3————Q===
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))