Did IBM and 'Deep Blue' Cheat Kasparov?

[Random]

You lose the bet

http://www.scientificblogging.com/n...rcomputer_huygens_beats_human_go_professional

Whats interesting is that Huygens is a general-purpose supercomputer rather than being specially built like Deep Blue was. It's not even that big, weighing in at 60 TeraFlops. The world's fastest supercomputer is 1000 TeraFlops.

It still looks like it will be a while before a home-computer can play world-class Go.

I read the article. The computer had a nine-stone handicap (that's huge), and still managed to lose three blitz games before the final match.

Doesn't bode well for the future, but right now the computer could probably be defeated by a skilled and determined amateur in an even match.

 

[Foolmewunz]

You appear to have completely missed my point. Neither I, nor anyone else, has ever claimed that it is theoretically impossible to brute force Go. My whole point was that we will not have the computing power to do so in the forseeble future. The fact that we can use programming tricks to reduce the computing power needed does not alter that point in the slightest. Despite having been wrong about how soon Go playing computers will rival human players, I am still completely confident in saying that we do not currently, and will not in the near future (say, a few decades at least), have the computing power to calculate all possible moves in Go. Hell, we still can't even do that for chess.

As for your claim that anything that involves a finite number of calculations will eventually be solved, that is provably false. There are absolute limits to information transfer and storage that are set by physical laws. I'm fairly sure Go doesn't come close to those limits, but it is entirely possible to construct a similar game with a finite number of moves that can never be solved by brute force, even in theory.

Any known game, then.

(And no fair counting Calvinball or Mornington Crescent. Infinite whimsical variations cannot be measured when we're not even using the same number system as the players.)

 

[Cuddles]

Any known game, then.

Well, I said it's possible to construct one because I don't know if one actually exists. I wouldn't be all that surprised if someone has invented a game like that at some point though.

(And no fair counting Calvinball or Mornington Crescent. Infinite whimsical variations cannot be measured when we're not even using the same number system as the players.)

Ah, but today is opposite day, which means that we can only count Calvinball and Mornington Crescent.