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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: 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 ---