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October 13, 2007: Reykjavík University Holds Artificial Intelligence Festival. Iceland Review Online. "Reykjavík University (RU) opens the 2007 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Festival in Reykjavík Theater today at 1 pm. Icelandic experts in AI will present their projects and research in this field, including AI world champion Dr. Yngvi Björnsson. Dr. Ari K. Jónsson, who used to work as a scientist at NASA, will also give a presentation at tomorrow’s festival, as well as Grímur Jónsson from Össur, who will talk about AI in artificial limbs, and a representative from Marel, who discusses AI in food processing."
>>> Applications, Assisitive Technologies, Games & Puzzles, Competitions & Events (@ Resources for Students) October 2007 [issue date]: Cracking GO - Brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in this ancient Asian game. By Feng - Hsiung Hsu. IEEE Spectrum Online. "In 1957, Herbert A. Simon, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and later a Nobel Laureate in economics, predicted that in 10 years a computer would surpass humans in what was then regarded as the premier battleground of wits: the game of chess. Though the project took four times as long as he expected, in 1997 my colleagues and I at IBM fielded a computer called Deep Blue that defeated Garry Kasparov, the highest-rated chess player ever. You might have thought that we had finally put the question to rest -- but no. Many people argued that we had tailored our methods to solve just this one, narrowly defined problem, and that it could never handle the manifold tasks that serve as better touchstones for human intelligence. These critics pointed to weiqi, an ancient Chinese board game, better known in the West by the Japanese name of Go, whose combinatorial complexity was many orders of magnitude greater than that of chess. Noting that the best Go programs could not even handle the typical novice, they predicted that none would ever trouble the very best players. Ten years later, the best Go programs still can't beat good human players. Nevertheless, I believe that a world-champion-level Go machine can be built within 10 years, based on the same method of intensive analysis -- brute force, basically -- that Deep Blue employed for chess. I've got more than a small personal stake in this quest. At my lab at Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing, I am organizing a graduate student project to design the hardware and software elements that will test the ideas outlined here. ..." September 7, 2007: King me - Schaeffer solves checkers, then challenges poker champs. Concrete achievements in artificial intelligence research. By Richard Cairney. Folio - The U of A faculty and staff newspaper. "[Jonathan] Schaeffer was involved in two high-profile research projects which broke within a week of each other in July. The first was the culmination of an 18-year research project in which Schaeffer solved the game of checkers. After sifting through 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 (500 billion billion) checkers positions, Schaeffer and his colleagues built a checkers-playing computer program that cannot be beaten. Completed in late April, the Chinook program may be played to a draw but will never be defeated. Results of the research appeared in the July edition of the academic journal Science. ... 'I'm also really proud of the artificial intelligence program that we've built at the University of Alberta,' [Schaeffer] added. 'We've built up the premier games group in the world, definitely second-to-none. And we've built up a strong, international, truly world-class reputation, and I'm very proud of that.' Schaeffer's second big project was to pit his research team's computer poker program Polaris, against two of the world's top poker players, Phil 'the unabomber' Laak and Ali Eslami. The match up took place over two days at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Vancouver, B.C. Schaeffer, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, said the event was a natural evolution of the 1994 match between IBM's Deep Blue chess program and then-world chess champion Gary Kasparov. ... Schaeffer cites a lengthy list of applications in which artificial intelligence helps in our day to day lives, from scheduling airline flights so that goods and pilots are moved around in the most efficient ways possible, to programs that monitor your our habits in order to detect credit card fraud." September 4, 2007: Claremont man's BluffBot beats colleges' efforts. By Will Bigham. San Bernardino County Sun (sbsun.com). "A poker-playing robot co-developed by lifelong Claremont resident Jay Cordes overwhelmed its opponents and took first prize at a recent robot poker competition in Vancouver, British Columbia. The robot, called BluffBot 2.0, went undefeated in matches against its nine opponents, which included bots developed by teams at top research institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota and University of Alberta. The robot was created by software developer Teppo Salonen and developed by both Salonen and Cordes in their spare time. ... BluffBot is not yet advanced enough to consistently beat experienced poker players, said Cordes, a software developer at Prestige Software, but the developers hope to some day create a program that will. ... After being blindsided by BluffBot at this year's competition, which was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, [Michael] Bowling and other researchers hope to learn from their defeat and develop a superior bot. 'A lot of the universities are wondering, "What did they do, and how can we learn from it?"' Bowling said. 'And we don't know the answers to that.' A free version of BluffBot 1.0 can be downloaded at www.bluffbot.com." September / October 2007: Higher Games - On the 10th anniversary of Deep Blue's triumph over Garry Kasparov in chess, a prominent philosopher of mind asks, What did the match mean? By Daniel C. Dennett. Technology Review Magazine. "[F]or a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits--the title of world chess champion--has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all? ... Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov's brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches." August 8, 2007: Computers master the game board - They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate? By Chris Gaylord. The Christian Science Monitor. "On July 24, Polaris lost a close match against two top poker players. After two days and 4,000 hands of limit Texas hold em, the computer was behind by only about 30 bets. 'It was a tough opponent,' says Ali Eslami, one of the two poker pros who beat Polaris. 'To tell you the truth, if I had the chance to face it again right now for money, I wouldn't. There are easier humans out there. I'll stick with them.' The encroachment of lifeless data crunchers into our favorite pastimes marks more than just a countdown until computers are better at virtually everything. Any tabletop defeat is also milestones in the advancement of artificial intelligence. ... Some games are still too complicated for computers to master. The Japanese game of Go stands as the usual example. ... 'They've done eye tracking on Go experts,' says Susan Epstein, a computer science professor at Hunter College in New York City. 'The studies found that while there are hundred of good moves in front of them, the best [human] players only see three or four.' So how do you teach computers to 'see' what humans see? For one, stop relying on programs that simply map out a single game, suggests Michael Genesereth, director of the Logic Group at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. ... [H]e researches general gaming, where machines learn patterns and principles that work in a variety of puzzles. At the same conference where Polaris battled human opponents, Genesereth held his annual machine-on-machine championship. The competition pitted general-gaming programs against one another in a series of board game mash-ups. May the best code win."
>>> Chess, Scrabble, Checkers, Poker, Go, Games & Puzzles, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) July 28, 2007 [issue date]: Number-cruncher kills off checkers. New Scientist (Issue 2614; subscription req'd). "The ancient game of checkers is dead, following a long illness. Checkers, also known as draughts, has been killed by a mathematical proof that shows the game always results in a draw if neither player makes a mistake. A steady stream of games has succumbed to computer attack, including Connect Four, which was "solved" more than 10 years ago. But it took 18 years for Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist and games specialist at the University of Alberta in Canada, to solve checkers...."
>>> Poker, Checkers, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students), also see these related articles regarding Checkers and Poker July 28, 2007: Icelanders world champions in artificial intelligence. IcelandReview Online. "Dr. Yngvi Björnsson (right) and student Hilmar Finnsson (left) from Reykjavík University (RU) won the international General Game-Playing (GGP) Competition at the AAAI Conference in Vancouver, Canada, this week. The conference is one of the largest and most prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) conferences in the world and the GGP Competition, held for the third time this year, is one of several side events at the conference. ... The CADIA Player was developed by Björnsson and Finnsson at the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA) at RU, the only laboratory in Iceland dedicated to the research and development of artificial intelligence. ... Software entered in the competition is designed to play nearly all games, unlike conventional gaming software."
>>> Competitions -and- Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students), Games & Puzzles July 28, 2007: What’s the story with . . . Computer games? The Herald. "It is now more than a decade since Deep Blue sank its silicon-edged teeth into the throat of the human race's greatest chess champion. ... It shook [Garry] Kasparov. Afterwards, he said it 'left a scar in my memory'. But it also shook the world, albeit in a subtle way. As our champion fell, our relationship with machines changed, too. The vision of computers as our passive servants was fatally compromised. Newsweek declared the match: 'The Brain's Last Stand'. In the years that have followed, games that were once the preserve of the human grandmaster have fallen, too. ... Researchers recently announced the creation of an 'artificial intelligence' machine that can never be beaten at draughts. ... This week, the team behind Chinook took on an entirely different challenge: a human versus machine poker match. The lexicon of poker is the very stuff of human psychology, from 'bluff' (kidding an opponent you have a better hand than you do) to 'tells' (unintentional twitches which reveal the strength of your hand). ... Even if computers eventually win all our games, does that make them intelligent? ..." July 27, 2007: You Can Never Win Again. By Colby Cosh. National Post. "The irony is that Schaeffer's checkers research is one of the less philosophically interesting things his group has been up to in recent times. ... But his team is now developing software that can play Texas hold-'em poker against talented humans; the best iteration of their 'Polaris,' reigning world champion of computer poker, is being tested this week in a head-to-head game against star professionals Ali Eslami and Phil 'The Unabomber' Laak. So far, it is giving a decent account of itself, and perhaps that's bigger news than 'Checkers is solved.' Poker is much more like the things we ultimately want artificial intelligences to do; like marriage or politics, it is a rule-bound game environment in which each player has access to different information and psychology plays an enormous role. The solving of checkers is just one small step for the electronic children of man. The giant leap for automaton-kind lies ahead." July 26, 2007: In Poker Match Against a Machine, Humans Are Better Bluffers. By John Markoff. The New York Times. "In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional human poker players. The contest, which was billed as the 'First Man-Machine Poker Championship' and which offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted two professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, against a program written by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. They gave it a name that probably no gambler would ever choose as a nickname, Polaris. Poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers. Computer scientists have to develop different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player as well as difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. ... Research interest has shifted to games like poker in recent years, in part because chess is no longer of keen interest and in part because rapid progress is being made in developing new algorithms with broad practical applications in areas such as negotiation and commerce, said Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist. ... The version of poker used in the match Monday and Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence was a popular game called Texas Hold ’Em heads-up limit poker.... Mr. Laak, who is nicknamed the Unabomber because of his trademark hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, would frequently gesticulate wildly at the laptop computer screen and repeatedly referred to the computer’s play as 'sick' -- his way of describing an unexpected or extraordinary action on the part of the machine. ... 'Polaris was beating me like a drum,' Mr. Eslami said after the round."
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see the AAAI-07 conference homepage, these articles, and this NewsToon July 25, 2007: Poker hotshots narrowly defeat bluffing computer. By Jim Giles. NewScientist.com news. "After two thousand hands and countless 'flops', 'rivers', and 'turns', two elite poker players have narrowly defeated a formidable computer opponent. The result means that, while chess world champions have fallen to computers, humans still hold sway in poker, a game where psychology plays a huge role. Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami took on Polaris, software developed by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada, in a set-up designed to reduce the role that luck normally plays in a game of poker. ... The game was played at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada."
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see the AAAI-07 conference homepage and these articles July 24, 2007: Evil HAL 9000 or Benevolent R2D2 - The Future of A.I. [podcast]. Patt Morrison's live one-hour public affairs show with guest host, Jon Beaupre. 89.3 KPCC-FM , Southern California Public Radio. "Our most vivid images of artificially intelligent machines tends to come from science fiction movies, and they usually fall into two categories: evil robots run amok, bent on destroying mankind or wise androids assisting and saving humans. The reality of A.I. machines is a little more complex, but the advancements are coming in leaps and bounds with ever more intelligent and autonomous systems that are being designed for such tasks as caretakers for children and the elderly, independent transportation vehicles and war making. There are still many ethical and safety concerns that must be addressed. How long before we can all expect to have our own A.I. robot friend in our homes?" Jon's guests are:
>>> AI Overview, Ethical & Social Implications, Robots, Science Fiction, Grand Challenges, Autonomous Vehicles, Filtering, Information Retrieval, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Poker, Checkers, Games & Puzzles, Applications July 24, 2007: Taking on a computer with a poker face - Two human players challenge U of A's Polaris in four-match tournament. By Laura Payton. CanWest News Service | Edmonton Journal. "Two successful poker players are trying to prove they know when to hold and when to fold against the reigning world champion computer poker program. Phil 'The Unabomber' Laak, a professional poker player, and Ali Eslami, a player experienced in high-stakes games, are taking on the University of Alberta's latest artificial intelligence poker playing technology. ... 'In some sense, we're aiming for a draw on match one,' said Michael Bowling, the leader of the team that created Polaris. The program needs to get used to the humans' style of play and learn what mistakes they tend to make. ... 'Our goal is to study imperfect information games. Games in the sense of a mathematical model for interaction between intelligent entities,' said Bowling, 'not in the sense of play.'"
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see the AAAI-07 conference homepage and these articles, and in regard to checkers see these July 23, 2007: Computer takes on poker aces to see who's the busted flush. By Ian Sample. The Guardian. "A showdown pitting human brains against artificial intelligence goes ahead this evening when two professional poker players take on a computer in the world's first such man-machine challenge. Phil Laak and Ali Eslami will play Polaris, the most sophisticated poker-playing program yet written, the product of years of research and refinement by a team of artificial intelligence experts at the University of Alberta in Canada. ... The poker challenge has been organised by the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence as part of its annual meeting. ... Polaris has been written to learn its opponent's playing strategy and identify its weaknesses."
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see the AAAI-07 conference homepage and these articles July 19, 2007: Checkmate for checkers - Computer program is unbeatable at English draughts. By Tom Geller. news @ nature.com. "Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw. Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989.... The results were announced today in the journal Science1. The paper and supporting materials, including the ability to play Chinook, are available on the web at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook. Jaap van den Herik, editor of the International Computer Games Journal, calls the achievement 'a truly significant advance in artificial intelligence'. ... Schaeffer notes that his research has implications beyond the checkers board. The same algorithms his team writes to solve games could be helpful in searching other databases, such as vast lists of biological information because, as he says, 'At the core, they both reduce to the same fundamental problem: large, compressed data sets that have to be accessed quickly.'"
>>> Checkers, Chess, Othello, Go, Poker, Games & Puzzles, Applications, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) June 29, 2007: Why computers can't surpass Go and collect $1 million - There’s one game where artificial intelligence can’t beat humans. Comment by Ben Macintyre. Times Online. "Ten years ago last month, to the dismay of many chess enthusiasts, the IBM supercomputer program Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov: the greatest chess mind alive was elbowed aside by raw computing muscle. ... The computer is now dominant in almost every board and card game devised by man. ... Yet there is one game in which the computer is still no match for Man, a game in which a competent teenager can beat the world’s most sophisticated computer program with ease: and that is the ancient Chinese board game Go, the oldest game in the world, and the only one at which man remains the undisputed champion. ... Go is seen as a key to unlocking the secret of artificial intelligence (AI). If computers can 'learn' the game, some scientists believe, mankind would be a huge step closer to replicating human thought processes, with great scientific benefits. ... A Taiwanese organisation has offered $1 million for the first computer program to defeat a junior Go champion, yet despite some recent advances, none has yet reached that skill level." June 11, 2007: Poker pros out of luck in battle with 'bot - U of A team pits man against machine in experiment that negates effect of good fortune. By David Staples. The Edmonton Journal (canada.com). "Poker is a game of luck and skill, but to find out who really is better at the game, man or machine, a group of University of Alberta computer scientists has come up with an experiment that negates luck as a factor. In the experiment, the U of A team will pit its state-of-the-art poker-playing laptop program, Polaris, against two top-flight professional poker players, Phil (The Unabomber) Laak and Ali Eslami. They will play four sessions of Texas Hold 'Em at an artificial intelligence conference July 23 and 24 in Vancouver. 'The question is: "How good are humans in poker in relation to computers?" and we don't have an answer for that because the previous results have been clouded by this luck versus skill issue,' says Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the U of A's computer science department. He designed Chinook, the checkers program that beat world checkers champion Marion Tinsley in 1994. ... The U of A team, led by Prof. Michael Bowling, has 15 members and includes former poker pro Darse Billings. ... The poker challenge isn't as significant in the public imagination as IBM Deep Blue's victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but it's more significant in terms of artificial intelligence science, Schaeffer says. ... 'Poker is a much better representative of real-world situations with imperfect information, negotiation, bluffing and misrepresentation,' Schaeffer says. 'This makes it much more interesting. From a scientific point of view, it's a harder problem because of that.'"
>>> Poker, Checkers, Chess, Games & Puzzles, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see this related NewsToon and the AAAI-07 conference homepage June 2007: The Human Checkmate. Editorial. The New Atlantis 16, Spring 2007, p. 135. "The world’s greatest chess player lost to a computer ten years ago, in a match widely purported to portend the rise of machine intelligence, and perhaps eventually the supplanting of humans as the dominant intelligence on earth. ... The talk of intelligent machines taking over the planet thus reveals less about the reality of AI research -- which has had a long history of bold promises and gross failures -- than it does about the radically anti-human aspirations of the researchers. ... We need not worry about the technical excellence of the machines we create; indeed, we should admire it. It is the dreams of some of the machine-makers that should concern us." June 2007: The Traveler's Dilemma - When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning. By Kaushik Basu. Scientific American. "Despite their names, Prisoner's Dilemma and the two-choice version of Traveler's Dilemma present players with no real dilemma. Each participant sees an unequivocal correct choice, to wit, 2 (or, in the terms of the prisoner story line, incriminate the other person). That choice is called the dominant choice because it is the best thing to do no matter what the other player does. ... In contrast, the full version of TD has no dominant choice. ... When studying a payoff matrix, game theorists rely most often on the Nash equilibrium, named after John F. Nash, Jr., of Princeton University. ... The game and our intuitive prediction of its outcome also contradict economists' ideas. ... How People Actually Behave - Over the past decade researchers have conducted many experiments with TD, yielding several insights. >>> Reasoning, Games & Puzzles, Cognitive Science, Multi-Agent Systems, Induction May 30, 2007: Software learns when it pays to deceive. By Zeeya Merali. NewScientist.com news (from Issue 2606: page 32). "Now [Evan] Hurwitz and Tshilidzi Marwala, also at [University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa], have developed a virtual player that has taught itself to bluff at a card game called lerpa. Their artificial intelligence bot, named Aiden, is based on a neural network algorithm that usually forecasts stock market fluctuations. ... 'This demonstrates that computers can learn this peculiarly human behaviour,' says Philippe de Wilde, a computer scientist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. 'They generate the strategy from play, which is a very human way of learning.'" May 17, 2007: Matt Ginsberg - Math genius adds drama to his résumé. The Register-Guard. "Yes, folks, Matt Ginsberg really is trying to be a Renaissance man. And he's pretty much succeeding. Ginsberg, 51, is a whiz in the arcane computer world of artificial intelligence. He's co-founder and CEO of On Time Systems, a Eugene company whose software helps the Navy schedule ship repairs more efficiently and helps the Air Force conserve jet fuel. With a doctorate in math from Oxford, Ginsberg helped found the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory at the University of Oregon. While there he wrote GIB, the world's first expert bridge-playing program (which Bridge World calls 'the best bridge-playing program we have seen' and The New York Times called simply 'the best of its kind'). ... Besides being a computer genius, he is the author of 'Old Friends,' a dark drama that's among the three new plays to be presented this weekend at Willamette Repertory Theatre's annual Readings in Rep." May 13, 2007: We've Made Our Match. By William Saletan. The Washington Post. "Ten years ago this week, a computer beat the world chess champion in a six-game match. Since then, human champs have played three more matches against machines, scoring two draws and a loss. Grandmasters are being crushed. The era of human dominance is over. ... Don't be afraid. We, too, are getting smarter, and computers are a big reason why. They're not our enemies. They're our offspring -- our creations, helpers and challengers. We certainly needed the challenge. Chess computers, in particular, have exposed our complacency. ... The remarkable thing about us isn't our supremacy over computers. It's our interaction with them. ... When the cosmic game between humans and computers is complete, here's how the sequence of moves will read. In the opening.... In the endgame, we merged computers with our minds and bodies, bringing that projected intelligence back into ourselves. The distinction between human and artificial intelligence will turn out to have been artificial." May 11, 2007: A Decade After Kasparov's Defeat, Deep Blue Coder Relives Victory. By Robert Andrews. Wired. "The first, Deep Thought, emerged in 1988 from the drawing board of Carnegie Mellon grad student Feng-hsiung Hsu, who was hired by the computer maker a year later with the express intention of usurping the primacy of human logic. Upon joining IBM, Hsu recruited several programmers, including his computer science classmate, Canadian Murray Campbell, with whom he had prototyped an early chess-playing computer named Chiptest several years earlier. ... It was the third incarnation, dubbed Deep Blue, that finally knocked the master from his perch 15 months later. The match immediately became an iconic symbol of the advances made in artificial intelligence and supercomputing. ... Wired News: Why do you think the match captured the public imagination to such a great degree? Campbell: Not everybody plays but everybody knows that chess is a very difficult game -- you can devote your whole life to playing chess and still have room for improvement. So it's understood that chess is a game which requires intelligence and so for a machine to play at the level of the world champion is a sign that computers have progressed further than maybe some people had thought they had. In one sense, it's just one milestone among many along the way, but it's one that the general public could understand more easily. ... WN: What are Deep Blue’s roots, and on what technological principles did its forebears operate? Campbell: Claude Shannon, the famous computer scientist and mathematician proposed that chess was a grand challenge for these new things called computers -- if you could get a computer to play chess at the world champion level, you had done something really special. There was a turning point in the '70s when it was realized that, if you let computers do what they do best -- that is, search through as many possibilities as they can as quickly as they can -- and stop the pretense of trying to emulate how humans play, you actually got better performance. And so, from that day on, computers, including Deep Blue, tended to be focused on searching through as many possible chess moves as they could in the amount of time that was available for a computation."
>>> Chess, History; Interviews; also see this related NewsToon May 9, 2007: Computer bested humanity, technically. By Bruce Kauffmann. News-Journal.com. "That re-match culminated this week (May 11) in 1997, when the new Deep Blue defeated [Garry] Kasparov 3.5 games to 2.5. Kasparov, who had been called by Newsweek magazine 'The Brain's Last Stand,' conceded defeat after just 19 moves in the decisive sixth game. Yet in many ways the match was inconclusive in settling the 'human' versus 'artificial' intelligence debate. If Kasparov's humanity -- his ability to reason -- was his strength, so was it his weakness. ... Will artificial intelligence ever advance enough to trump human intelligence, and, if so, what happens then? ... An age-old question that everyone from scientists to science fiction writers has pondered. It's when the machines start pondering it that we will all have to start worrying." May 6, 2007: Deep Blue victory still a milestone 10 years later. By Julie Moran Alterio. The Journal News. "$137.50. That's how much it costs today to buy the home version of the Deep Fritz software that beat world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik in a match last year. What a difference a decade makes. This week marks the 10th anniversary of the first time a computer bested a reigning world chess champ. That feat cost Armonk-based IBM Corp. about $5 million. The face-off between IBM's Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in New York City culminated in a victory for machine over man in the final joust of the six-game match May 11, 1997. ... What might be surprising to contemplate today is how much Kasparov was favored to win at the time of the match. ... The first computer chess programs date to the 1950s, including one written for an IBM 704 mainframe that took 8 minutes to make a move and could be defeated by a beginner. ... When he was interviewed on National Public Radio, a caller asked what the big deal was, didn't they just program the moves into the computer, [Joel] Benjamin recalled. 'A lot of people didn't realize just how historic it was because even then computers were credited with being able to do anything,' he said." April 9, 2007: For him, Scrabble is a science - Meeting the Minds | MIT Junior Jason Katz-Brown. By Billy Baker. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "A 20-year-old junior at MIT, [Jason] Katz-Brown is a star in the quirky world of competitive Scrabble. Last April, after just three years of playing, he was ranked number one in North American Scrabble after he won the Boston Area Scrabble Tournament. (He will try to defend that title in Westford on Friday.) But what's really got the Scrabble world buzzing about Katz-Brown is his role in creating Quackle , an artificial intelligence program that defeated a former world champion in the finals of a human vs. computer tournament in Toronto in November." March 11, 2007: One day, 41 rides: It's no problem for the Line King. By Larry Bleiberg. San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate.com). "Rich Vosburgh worked out hard, spending four months with a personal trainer. He scrutinized maps and a detailed timetable. He even deployed a secret weapon: artificial-intelligence research to chart a course through death-defying drops, torrents of water and fiery heat. And when this adventurer clambered out of a floating log last year, he had reached his holy grail: visiting -- in a single day -- each of the 41 operating rides, attractions and shows at the Everest of theme parks, Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. His time: a record 10 hours, 40 minutes. ... At heart, the challenge is an enduring and perplexing quandary: What's the most efficient way to route someone to multiple places, taking into account constantly changing conditions? Mathematicians call it the Time Dependent Traveling Salesman Problem. ... Seeking a solution - Enter Len Testa, a doctoral candidate from North Carolina A&T University with a Mickey Mouse-ear tattoo on his ankle. He developed a patent-pending artificial-intelligence program to give visitors the most efficient park-touring plan. Instead of testing every option to find the best route, a computer quickly settles on a plan that's almost the most efficient." March 11, 2007: Lesson 86 - Computer baduk. By Nam Chi-hyung. The Korea Times. "After the world championship-level performances of computer programs for chess, checkers, backgammon, othello and many other board games, all eyes have turned to baduk as the last frontier of computer game research. ... The A.I. techniques used in computer programs playing other games, however, are generally unsuccessful in computer baduk. Compared to the research on chess, where the computer started playing a reasonable game in around 1980 and is now playing at human World Championship level after some twenty or twenty-five years of persistent effort thereafter, the research on baduk is still at a very low level. Roughly speaking, the huge amount of branching in baduk is the main reason why the brute-force search technique, which enjoyed great success in computer chess, does not work in computer baduk." February 21, 2007: Algorithm helps computers beat human Go players. By Andras Gergely. Reuters.ca / also available from ZDNet. "Computers can beat some of the world's top chess players, but the most powerful machines have failed at the popular Asian board game 'Go' in which human intuition has so far proven key. Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn. 'On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player,' said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI." February 4, 2007: Mind raaga. By John Sarkar. The Economic Times. "The human brain is a maze of possibilities. Though some might argue that algorithms work, as efficiently as live synapses, it has not been proved yet. Hardcore number crunching might be easy meat for software programs but pattern recognition and feelings are something that artificial intelligence is arguably, light years away from. In spite of this comforting thought, artificial intelligence has conquered almost all frontiers of mindgames. ... [Computers] are the undeniable champions in draughts and Othello. They are generally stronger in backgammon. They are steadily gaining ground in Scrabble, poker and bridge. Even crossword puzzles have been put under the sword. But there is one last hope. Go.... Deep Blue and its successors beat Kasparov using the ‘brute force’ technique. ... Unfortunately, brute force will not work in Go. ... At Microsoft's research centre in Cambridge, scientists are taking a simpler approach to working out how to beat the best humans. They're telling their program what the best humans did against each other in thousands of games, providing a vast repertoire of millions of moves." January 26, 2007: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament. By Brock Read. The Chronicle (of Higher Education) Wired Campus Blog. "When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program's victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to notice. The Wired Campus intends to fix that. At a Scrabble tournament in Toronto, a piece of software called Quackle triumphed in a best-of-five series over David Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995. ... Mr. Boys seemed to have no trouble keeping a sense of perspective after the loss: 'It's still better to be a human than to be a computer,' he said." January 25, 2007: Artificial intelligence - Winning ways. Computers have started to outperform humans in games they used to lose. The Economist. "Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as pattern recognition, learning and planning. They also hold out the tantalising possibility of fame and fortune should the program ever clobber a human champion. ... Deep Blue and its successors beat Mr Kasparov using the 'brute force' technique. ... In the past two decades researchers have explored several alternative strategies, from neural networks to general rules based on advice from expert players, with indifferent results. Now, however, programmers are making impressive gains with a technique known as the Monte Carlo method. ... MoGo, a [Go] program developed by researchers from the University of Paris, has even beaten a couple of strong human players on the smaller of these boards -- unthinkable a year ago. It is ranked 2,323rd in the world and in Europe's top 300." January 16, 2007: Robot learns to play dirty Scrabble. New Scientist (Issue 2586, page 23; subscription req'd). "Beating people at Scrabble is already no contest for computer programs, which can easily memorise entire dictionaries. Now a Scrabble-playing program has gone one better by playing dirty. Developed by Eyal Amir and Mark Richards at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the program is able to predict which letter tiles other players hold, and use this information to choose moves which block a high-scoring word that an opponent might otherwise have played. ... [Amir] presented the bot at a conference on artificial intelligence in Hyderabad, India this week." Vladimir Kramnik vs. Deep Fritz December 14, 2006: The Most Human Game. By Fred Waitzkin. Forbes.com. "[I]n 1997, Kasparov played his rematch against Deep Blue, the strongest chess computer on the planet. Kasparov had beaten the machine one year earlier.... The match was held in New York City and was billed as the contest that would ultimately answer the big question: what is the most intelligent thinking machine on the planet? Chess, with its great beauty, layered strategies and psychological gambits, was the testing ground to resolve this issue. At the time, many of us were uncomfortable or even incredulous at the prospect that a machine might actually beat a man at this uniquely human game. The machine won, of course. ... Going in, Kasparov had recognized that in a test of sheer calculating power he would lose, so he guided the computer into openings and unclear positions where intuition and strategy would decide games more than number crunching. ... The computer killed Kasparov with patience and psychology more than brute force--or at least that was how Kasparov experienced his beating. ... The fact that the new World Champion Vladimir Kramnik blundered terribly and lost his million-dollar match last week against the Deep Fritz laptop computer...." December 8, 2006: Man v machine (and guess who won). By Stephen Moss. The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited Sport. "When the Deep Blue supercomputer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was seen as a huge blow for the human race. Some say Kasparov never recovered from the defeat, and he lost his title three years later to his protege, Vladimir Kramnik. Now Kramnik himself has been beaten by a computer and, if anything, the defeat should be even more humbling for mankind. ... [H]e has lost to a program which in its basic form retails at £36.50. Surely this really is the end of chess, and possibly the beginning of the end for the human race too. ... In any case, the reality is that this is not the end for chess. As John Saunders, editor of British Chess Magazine, has suggested, it could be a new beginning." December 6, 2006: Chess Machine Defeats Man - Deep Fritz, a chess-playing computer, beats chess champion Vladimir Kramnik after upgrade. By Cassimir Medford. Red Herring. "The best human chess player in the world, Vladimir Kramnik, on Wednesday lost to Deep Fritz, a multiprocessor computer that plays and teaches chess. Deep Fritz won the six-game tournament by four points to two after winning the last game in Bonn, Germany. ... The Man vs. Machine chess battles have spurred the parallel development of new and improved hardware and software for decades. The Machine in the form of Deep Blue, IBM’s massively parallel AS 400, won its first victory in 1997 when it defeated Mr. Kasparov." December 5, 2006: World chess champion loses to computer. The Associated Press / available from The Mercury News. "World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik lost his final game in a match against computer program Deep Fritz on Tuesday, ceding a hard-fought Man vs. Machine series 4-2." December 3, 2006: Kramnik vs Deep Fritz: Game five ends in a fighting draw. ChessBase.com. "World champion Vladimir Kramnik had the white pieces for the last time in this match, and needed a win in order to have chances for an overall victory."
>>> Chess, Games & Puzzles, Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see this related NewsToon December 1, 2006: World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik defends tenaciously to draw computer Deep Fritz. The Associated Press / available from The International Herald Tribune. "World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik defended tenaciously and held computer program Deep Fritz to a draw Friday in the fourth game of the Man vs. Machine match." November 29, 2006: Kramnik plays computer Deep Fritz to a draw in 3rd game of man v. machine chess tourney. The Associated Press / available from The International Herald Tribune. "Unlike the first two games, in which Kramnik outplayed the machine and obtained an advantage, the computer stood better for much of the time. The computer now leads the six-game match 2-1 after Kramnik's colossal blunder in game two, in which he allowed a mate in one." November 28, 2006: Why artificial intelligence is never enough - The greatest games have a definite beauty, hard as it is to explain to non-chess players. Dominic Lawson's column in The Independent Online. "A 31-year-old Russian will spend the next seven days attempting to demonstrate that even in the silicon age, a human can still outthink the computer. ... With the help of algorithms which cut off obviously pointless searches, the latest generation of programs avoids a vast number of redundant calculations. As a result, Deep Fritz is now about the same playing strength as Kramnik and possibly stronger; but the most interesting question remaining is simply this: is the machine really playing chess? This is analogous to the test proposed by Alan Turing, who in 1950 wrote the very first chess program. Turing asserted that a machine could be said to be thinking only if, when concealed from an observer, that observer would be unable to distinguish the words or 'thoughts' it produced from those which might have emerged from a person. Turing's test is still at the heart of man's attempt to create artificial intelligence, which is why Kramnik v Fritz is of more than sporting interest." November 27, 2006: Late game blunder costs Kramnik in loss to Deep Fritz chess software. The Associated Press / available from The International Herald Tribune. "After outplaying the machine for most of the game, and with a clear draw in hand, [Kramnik] made a colossal blunder that allowed checkmate on the move. Deep Fritz now leads the six-game match, 1.5-0.5."
>>> Chess, Games & Puzzles, Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see this related NewsToon November 25, 2006: OK computer, it's time... By Malcolm Pein. Telegraph.co.uk. "The next phase in the battle for supremacy between Man and Machine begins this afternoon in Bonn when the world champion Vladimir Kramnik takes on the computer program Deep Fritz. ... Kramnik admitted the odds are against him: 'The machine is the clear favourite, but don't discount me just yet. But I think I can still beat it. Whenever I can fight, I'm extremely motivated. After all, I might be the last human being to be able to defeat this machine. My team and I will be expending all our efforts to cut this so-called artificial intelligence down to size.'"
>>> Chess, Games & Puzzles, Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see this related NewsToon October 22, 2006: David Shenk displays some good moves in his absorbing history of chess. Gaylord Dold reviews "The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain" by David Shenk. The Wichita Eagle. "Some 1,500 years ago the game of chess emerged from India into the ancient Persian Empire, where it became a full-fledged two-player game of war called chatrang. ... Shenk delves into several issues involved in modern scientific research as well. He devotes considerable time to the idea of the 'beautiful problems' connecting chess to computer research, particularly the manufacture of artificial intelligence. Since the invention of modern computing in Britain by Alan Turing and others, programmers have been fascinated by the connection between problem-solving and human thought. For some, the goal has been to create a machine that can think like a human, or at least a machine that can fool humans into believing it can think." September 28, 2006: World Series of PokerBots? By Falstaff. Poker Works. "What if the bot played another bot, and then another bot, in a series of round-robin, heads-up matches, to determine the virtual bracelet winner in a 'World Series of PokerBots?' That's just what was held this summer in Boston, right as the World Series of Poker was kicking off in Las Vegas. Under the more academically-friendly auspices of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a team from the University of Alberta defeated all comers in two different types of Limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments where none of the players had a pulse to register, or a single physical tell. ... Another interesting twist, by [Robert] Holte, to the thought that bots have no tells: '...you might be amused to know that one recent version of our bot did have a physical tell -- it played slightly more quickly if it had a good hand, and this was picked up by the human expert on our team who tests our bots. We corrected the problem before the tournament, but it shows that physical tells in bots are not impossible.'" September 19, 2006: AI Invades Go Territory. By Brendan Borrell. Wired News. "Chess was once the pinnacle of geekdom, but then the artificial intelligence geeks got too smart for chess and turned to Go. Why Go? ... In the past year, a new strategy implemented by computer scientist Rémi Coulom at the Université de Lille in France, has revolutionized the way these programmers have approached the problem. Coulom's program Crazy Stone won a gold medal at the 2006 Computer Olympiad in Torino, Italy. Recently, Coulom spoke to Wired News to explain some of the challenges of Go and what makes Crazy Stone work so well. Wired News: What makes programming go so much tougher than chess? ..." September 12, 2006: What's the Play, Robo-Coach? By Sam Jaffe. Wired News. "In 2001, a pair of backgammon experts walked into a coffee shop in Bloomington, Indiana, and sat down to talk football. Frank Frigo and Chuck Bower had both reached world-rank status in the world of backgammon at a unique moment in history -- amid the rise of neural net computer programs. Mocked by most backgammon players when they first appeared in the early 1970s, the programs eventually improved to the point where they are now better than any human player of the game. Like most other backgammon players, both men now practiced against these programs. Frigo, an energy marketing executive, eagerly outlined his plan to build a similar program for NFL football. Bower, an astrophysics professor at Indiana University, wasn't convinced at first. But after several weeks of e-mails and phone conversations, he agreed to try. The fruit of their labors was Zeus ...." September 5, 2006: I'm Puzzled. Editor's Eye blog by Jon Erickson. Dr. Dobb's Portal. "I like to tell myself that I'm pretty good at times, but I admit I'm no where as good as WebCrow, a computer program that took on--and soundly whipped--dozens of human competitors at last month's European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. ... According to the authors, problems like solving crosswords from clues have been defined as AI-complete and are extremely challenging for machines since there is no closed-world assumption and they require human-level knowledge. Interestingly, for the first time since AI's kick-off, there is a first nucleus of technology, such as search engines, information retrieval and machine learning techniques, that enable computers to enfold with semantics real-life concepts. The goal of WebCrow's authors is to design a software system whose major assumption is to attack crosswords making use of the Web as its primary source of knowledge." September 4, 2006: How Chess Can Help Stave Off Alzheimer's - Writer David Shenk Traces the History of Chess in 'The Immortal Game' (book excerpt). ABC News. "In a wide-ranging examination of chess, David Shenk uncovers the hidden history of a game that was invented in India around 500 A.D. and seems more popular than ever today. From its enthusiastic adoption by the Persians and its spread by Islamic warriors, to its 21st century importance to the development of artificial intelligence and use as a teaching tool in inner-city America, chess has been a omnipresent factor in the development of civilization."
>>> Chess, History, Cognitive Science September 3, 2006: Meet the world's cyberchess champ - Israel's Deep Junior. By Laura Goldman. Israel 21c. "According to [Shay] Bushinsky, Deep Junior isn't as fast as Deep Blue because it is a program, as opposed to Deep Blue which is an entire computer that is specifically designed to play chess. It can calculate the potential outcome of about 9 million moves per second, compared with Deep Blue's 200-300 million, but is more selective about the positions it analyzes. One of the innovations of Deep Junior over other chess programs is the way it counts moves, he explained. ... Deep Junior is not programmed to take only the safest move, and its unique playing style is praised by Kasparov till this day. Now the two partners are hoping to persuade Bulgarian World Champion Grandmaster Veselin Topolov, the current world's best player, to play the new and improved Deep Junior program that will be coming out this summer." September 1, 2006: Crossword-solving system strikes a blow for AI. By Simon Aughton. PC Pro News. "A crossword-solving computer program has struck another blow for artificial intelligence by beating all 25 humans in completing two English-language puzzles and one Italian and English bilingual puzzle in a competition in Italy. ... Crosswords are just one test of the ability of computers to match human reasoning. In 1997 an IBM chess program, Deep Blue, caused a considerable stir by beating the then world champion Garry Kasparov, considered by some to be the greatest chess player ever. August 31, 2006: Crossword software thrashes human challengers. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. ... Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. 'It's part of a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence,' he says."
>>> Crossword Puzzles, Games & Puzzles; also see this related article and this NewsToon August 31, 2006: Revolutionizing Football - New computer modeling software could make gridiron coaches rethink their decisions and look to science for guidance. By Brittany Sauser. Technology Review. "A startup venture, EndGame Technologies, has designed novel computer modeling software to assist National Football League coaches with critical play-calling decisions--the kind that often determine the outcome of the game. ... The software, called ZEUS, is designed to answer such questions by calculating the consequences of each decision in a matter of seconds. ... According to [Chuck] Bower, the challenge for them now lies not in the technology, but in getting NFL teams to adopt it.' ... The problem: ZEUS is still illegal under NFL guidelines. The league doesn't permit computers on the sidelines or in the coach's booth on game day. ... 'We are very resistant to changing for the sake of changing,' says Brain McCarthy, NFL spokesperson. 'Part of the appeal of the NFL is that it is man against man against elements and unscripted drama. When you add technology that could directly influence play on the field it has the potential of detracting from the overall product and enjoyability of the game.'"
>>> Sports, Chess, Backgammon (@ More Games & Puzzles), Games & Puzzles, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications August 16, 2006: Go, digital - The Chinese game has programmers on a quest for an algorithm to defeat other computers -- and then lead to artificial intelligence applications. By Brendan Borrell. The Oregonian. "For the past four years, [Peter] Drake and his [Lewis & Clark College] students tried nearly every novel approach out there: neural networks, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms. Their victory with this ingenious algorithm marked a turning point for Orego and was the latest application of a promising new strategy in artificial intelligence. ... Go is a board game that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago. ... The challenges of Go are more representative of the real world problems humans face: The pieces may be black and white, but the solutions never are. Drake says that solving this class of problems will help in designing electronic circuits, controlling flows in a sewage plant, or building cars that can drive themselves. 'It's considered an open question in artificial intelligence,' he adds. ... The night that Orego beat JacquelineGo ... Drake was using a new strategy pioneered by Remi Coulom at Universite Charles de Gaulle in Lille, France. Drake says, 'Rather than trying to come up with some special rules that are specific to Go and require lots of time and an expert player to come up with, you just say, "Well, I'm at this position, and I will play the rest of this game out randomly a hundred times or a thousand times and if black usually wins then this is a good position for black."' Mathematicians call this a Monte Carlo method because of its likeness to games of chance found in that European city's casinos." August 13, 2006: Alberta team studies artificial intelligence with poker-playing computer. By Kristine Owram. The Canadian Press / available from canada.com. "If the crew of 2001: A Space Odyssey needed to defeat evil supercomputer HAL, they should have challenged it to a game of poker. Unlike IBM's Deep Blue, a computer that was able to beat world-champion chess player Garry Kasparov in 1997, even the world's best poker-playing computers would flop against the top human players. That's because computer scientists have not yet figured out how to write programs that can make informed decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information, said Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the University of Alberta's computer science department and Canada Research Chair in artificial intelligence. ... Schaeffer was part of the team that designed Hyperborean, a poker-playing computer that recently went undefeated at two tournaments hosted by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence." August 9, 2006: AI & Poker: A Smart Bet. Jon Erickson's Editor's Eye blog at Dr. Dobb's Portal. "[A team from the University of Alberta] did win the first AAAI Computer Poker Competition held in conjunction with this year's American Association of Artificial Intelligence conference in Boston. The U of A computer program defeated all other programs in a two tournament format of one-on-one Texas Hold 'Em. .. All in all, there were five competing bots, including three from collegiate teams and two from individuals: * "Hyperborean" written by Michael Bowling, Martin Zinkevich, Darse Billings, Nolan Bard, Morgan Kan, Michael Johanson, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Neil Burch, Carmelo Piccione, and Finnegan Southey, of the University of Alberta. * "GS2" written by Andrew Gilpin and Tuomas Sandholm from Carnegie Mellon University . * "Monash BPP" designed by Ann Nicholson, Kevin Korb, and Steven Mascaro of Monash University (Australia). * "BluffBot" written by Teppo Salonen from Irvine, California. * "Teddy"by Morten Lynge in Ikast, Denmark. Each bot won at least one series. ... The AAAI event is the most intensive competition there is for poker programs. ... 'Poker is a game that involves skill, chance, and many forms of uncertainty', said Alberta's professor Jonathan Schaeffer who I interviewed last year in this brief podcast. 'It is a great problem for artificial intelligence, and we stand to learn a lot from competitions like this.'"
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles, Conferences and Competitions (@ Resources for Students) August 3, 2006: Computers just can't seem to get past Go - Chess is a doddle compared to this ancient oriental game of strategy that has programmers and scientists scratching their heads. By Charles Arthur. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited Technology. "When Garry Kasparov was beaten, to his furious humiliation, by IBM's Deep Blue chess computer in 1997, it left human players pondering their future. Draughts, Othello, backgammon, Scrabble: by the start of this century, each had been all but conquered by machines. But don't worry. Almost a decade later, with Moore's Law still at work, there is still a board game in which humans reign supreme. The game is Go, an oriental game of strategy. ... Even the lure of a US$1 million prize for the first program to beat a human professional went uncollected after the deadline passed in 2000. No program has yet come close to meeting the challenge. Now, however, there may be a new attack on this outpost of humanity. At Microsoft's research centre in Cambridge, scientists are taking a simpler approach to working out how to beat the best humans. They're telling their program what the best humans did against each other in thousands of games, providing a vast repertoire of millions of moves. Are computers about to invade another piece of our gameplaying territory? ... [C]omputer chess games don't understand chess; they just got better at crunching moves. Won't brute force do the job on Go, as it did in other games? No, says Bob Myers, who runs the Intelligent Go website. ... Now, though, [David] Stern and the Microsoft team are trying a different tack. Instead of wondering how to get a computer to beat a human, they are showing the computer how humans beat each other - by creating a huge database of moves and positions from professional games." August 3, 3006: Man vs machine: A crossword smackdown. By Matt Gaffney. National Post & canada.com (subscription req'd). "When people find out that I write crosswords for a living, they often ask, "Can't you just write crosswords using a computer program now?" After I finish crying -- some people really know how to hurt a guy -- I respond that, yes, computers play a role in crossword design these days. There are three parts to constructing a crossword: coming up with a theme, filling in the grid and writing the clues. Until artificial intelligence makes some serious leaps, humans will do the heavy lifting when it comes to theme creation and clue writing. But the second part, filling grids with words, is quite computer-friendly." August 2006 [issue date]: The Expert Mind. By Philip E. Ross. Scientific American (pages 64 - 71). "Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking -- the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called. ... In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understanding of expert memory by studying its limitations. ... Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks." July 29, 2006: Producing the ultimate game-playing bots. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2562; subscription req'd). "Compared with their human counterparts, today's game-playing computer programs are really quite boring. However skilful they may be, each is only ever good at one game. Take the chess-playing computer Deep Blue, developed by IBM. Although it beat human world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, present it with much simpler games such as checkers or noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) and it wouldn't have a clue where to begin. 'Deep Blue can't play checkers at all,' says Michael Genesereth, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Now a new breed of programs that specialise in general game playing (GGP) is emerging. Unlike specialist game players, which are pre-programmed with sets of strategies borrowed from human players, these programs devise their own game plans using nothing but a list of rules given to them 30 minutes before play begins. 'The computer has to conceptualise the game and come up with appropriate strategies,' says Genesereth. Last week he organised the second General Game Playing competition at the annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in Boston. The winner, a bot called Fluxplayer, earned its creators Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany a $10,000 prize." July 28, 2006: Fun if You Play Your Cards Right. By John Breeden II. The Washington Post (page WE44). "With the current popularity of poker, it's natural that the game industry would want in on the action. 'Stacked With Daniel Negreanu' does a good job of duplicating a professional poker setting, without any actual money on the line. ... The computer players have realistic voices and various catchphrases. They don't seem to have 'tells' to tip you off when they are bluffing, but each player has a unique personality and betting strategy. ... Each player uses artificial intelligence called Poki, based on neural network and game theory research, to decide plays." July 26, 2006: Researchers study 'shogi' players in bid to unravel brain's mysteries. By Shoji Tsue. Kyodo News & The Japan Times Online. "Researchers study 'shogi' players in bid to unravel brain's mysteries The Japan Shogi Association have opened the Shogi Super-Brain Research Society with cooperation from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research to study how the brains of professional 'shogi' players work. ... A game between a professional player and shogi software will be held in the fall to analyze the player's brain with MRI equipment and a device to measure brain waves. The researchers will look at brain activity during the games as well as the differences between professional and amateur players. This research will not only help the field of brain science but also fields such as robot engineering, medicine and psychology. It could even be a big step in the development of artificial intelligence." July 19, 2006: CMU deals a winning hand for Texas Hold 'em. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Carnegie Mellon University researchers are raising the stakes now that their Texas Hold 'em computer program has beaten other competing programs and forced some expert human players to fold. ... Dr. [Tuomas] Sandholm is attending the national conference this week in Boston, where he and his GS2 program are competing in the poker competition. Surprising aspects of the program include the fact it was developed by two men who are not expert poker players. The second surprise? The program is not based on strategies employed by the world's best poker players. Instead Dr. Sandholm and Mr. Gilpin pursued a purely mathematical approach to poker by using game and linear theory, algorithms, computer ingenuity and some voluminous data-crunching. ... Dr. Sandholm explains their computer strategy with obvious glee. Poker, unlike chess, where all information is available to both players, involves two players competing with incomplete information about what cards the opponent holds. It also combines rational actions mixed with irrational ones." July 13, 2006: Computers find poker, like real life, a tougher challenge than chess. By Robert S. Boyd. McClatchy Newspapers. "It may surprise you to learn that it's more difficult for a computer to play poker, perhaps the world's most popular card game, than chess, the pastime of deep thinkers. Unlike chess, poker deals with tricky matters such as uncertainty, probability, guesswork and deception - human wiles that a chess-playing robot, such as the one that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, doesn't need to consider. As a result, computer experts say, poker is more like real life - with all its subtleties and complications - than chess is, with its fixed rules and vast but finite possibilities. ... Five programs, with names such as Poki and Poker Probot, will test their problem-solving skills next week in a computer poker competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in Boston. ... Even with only two 'players' - two computer-software programs - there are a quintillion (1 with 18 zeros after it) possible combinations of cards and bets for the computers to deal with in each game." July 7, 2006: Computer Poker - AI Contest is a Big Deal. Editor's Eye Blog by Jon Erickson. Dr. Dobb's. "Academically speaking, computer poker is all about game theory. But to the rest of the world, Texas Hold'Em is all about having some fun and making a couple of bucks--or rather, not losing your shirt. Whether for the excitement, money, or class credits, poker is all the rage these days, even with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) which is holding its first Computer Poker Competition at the upcoming annual AAAI conference. ... Unlike chess, where the status of all of the chess pieces is known to both players, poker forces players to make decisions based on incomplete information. 'You don't know what the other guy is holding,' [Tuomas] Sandholm explained."
>>> Poker, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Games & Puzzles, Expert Systems, Search, Uncertainty July - August 2006: Computers Play Chess; Humans Play Go. James Hendler's Letter from the Editor. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(4): 2-3. "The future of AI must involve exploring and understanding the parts of human intelligence we haven’t been looking at that much -- the stuff at the heart of human thought. To do this, we need to stop looking for new ways to solve well-defined problems and start looking for ways to combine the things we know how to do, and then see if this helps us explore problems with more diversity and scope. In fact, I’m encouraged to see a few developments that are taking us in the right direction. Ron Brachman, in his AAAI 2005 presidential address and in his role as a DARPAoffice director (see 'Systems That Know What They’re Doing,' Nov./Dec. 2002,pp. 67–71), advocated large AI projects that would force people from different parts of AI to work together to achieve, in consortium, what no approach could achieve alone." THERE'S MORE ! |
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