Did IBM and 'Deep Blue' Cheat Kasparov?

Funny thing is: The Computer didn't even know that it did win or not - or what chess is about, or what a human is, or IBM, or a computer...
 
SezMe said:
Sounds like that movie is a work of fiction and not to be relied upon as evidence of anything.
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It does, if you read it too quickly. In fact, Kasparov's "first quick defeat" happened in game two.

He never recovered. As I said earlier, I think the "points" made in the movie are highly dubious, with the exception of IBM's refusal to publish the conclusive proof that there had been no human intervention in game two.

More likely than not, the corporation just didn't care enough to do this after the match. Still, it seems a little churlish..
 
PixyMisa said:
I give it five years.
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If I were a betting person, I'd bet against it. Unless we actually manage to develop quantum computers, we won't have the computing power to brute force Go in the forseeable future. Programming is another matter and it's certainly possible someone will come up with a clever way of doing it. However, I really doubt it will be in the next five years, if at all. Not least because there are very few people even trying, Go just doesn't have the popularity chess does.

epeos76 said:
He never recovered. As I said earlier, I think the "points" made in the movie are highly dubious, with the exception of IBM's refusal to publish the conclusive proof that there had been no human intervention in game two.

More likely than not, the corporation just didn't care enough to do this after the match. Still, it seems a little churlish..
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The most obvious answer is that they may not have had a way to do so. Deep Blue will certainly have logs, but I doubt they are so easily accessable that they can just be opened up straight after a game. Even if they were, they would not be in a form that a layperson would understand. The people who claim conspiracy would just say the people who translated them, presumably the same ones who did the programing in the first place and part of the conspiracy, lied.
 
That could well be, though I think Kasparov and other interested parties could probably have found people with the know-how to do the translation. There's some evidence the the logs were available and would have been useful.

Kasparov (somewhat unreasonably) wanted the logs during the match, so presumably he thought he could do something with them. IBM denied him the logs during the match on the grounds that it would give him unfair insight into DeepBlue's decision making process.

At one point, IBM actually agreed to provide the logs after the match in order to get Kasparov to keep playing. Why didn't it do as it promised? Well, post match the special team IBM put together to create DeepBlue dissolved. I suspect there probably wasn't any single human being left with both the authority and the motive to make it happen. It's telling, or at least irritating, that the film makers didn't ask any of the IBM people they interviewed that question.

btw I'm a big fan of Go. I got into the habit of using "epeos76" playing online.
 
Cuddles said:
On the other hand, a computer that could beat a master at something like Go would be a serious achievement, and is something that no-one is sure would be possible no matter how powerful computers get, since the amount of calculations required to brute force it are so many orders of magnitude higher.
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Interestingly, my father had a Go playing computer while a psych prof at UNC in the late 70s. It played a modified version of the game (limited due the capability of the computers of the day) with other computers around the world. IIRC they lost in the championship round to a team from Toronto.

My gut feeling is that the best computers today (like the BlueGene I linked to earlier) have the processing power to easily dominate a human Go master. But, what is lacking is the programming.
 
Pato2747 said:
The link states a bunch of fallacies. "Kasparov said that Deep blue couldn't make those moves, so THERE WAS A HUMAN HELPING IT". It's drawing to conclusions based on simple speculation.
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I assume that whether Kasparov actually said that or not is a matter of record.

Whether it indicates there was probably a human doing it, I don't know.



Oh, wait. Yes I do. I've studied AI in detail and at the graduate level and programmed it professionally for years.

In layman's terms, basically when a guy like Kasparov says there's no way a computer could make such a move, he means the move is too clever for computers, which are little more than efficient game tree search machines.

See, there's this thing called the "horizon" effect, which basically means that, no matter how far you plan ahead, there could be something just further out you can't quite see that'll trash all your plans.

In simplest terms, it's setting your opponent up for a trap that they don't see, not because they're stupid, but because, in analyzing, "if I do this, then they do this, then I do this", and so on, the trap gets irrevocably entered into 3 more exchanges deep than you planned for.

Kasparov, who knows how computers and chess and chess algorithms work, would thus know there are certain moves a computer could not make precisely because they're too many moves deep. Indeed, chess grandmasters have long used this fact to beat chess computers, by setting up deep traps for the computer!

It's true programs are getting more clever, with larger tables of opening and closing moves, and various "deep plunge" algorithms, but the chess masters are very aware of all this, too*. In any case, there still is no solution anything significantly better than "try all possibilities".



So, yes, when he says it had a human feel to it, it would be a good thing to check out.






* After all, who the heck do you think are the primary domain experts on the construction of these computers!?!?
 
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madurobob said:
From the article:

That only makes sense if you have no head for business and no knowledge of IBM.

Once they beat Kasparov the deed was done. There would be little to gain in beating him again, and much to lose in a defeat.

Plus IBM in '97 was run by Lou Gerstner; famous for an intense focus on cutting spending that didn't drive revenue. The research arm of IBM always had a lot of leeway in how they spent money, but DeepBlue was never meant to be a revenue generator. It was a gimmick
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I.e. a revenue generator! :)


Maybe not directly, as gigantic computers with lots of chess hardwiring aren't a particularly big market. But that's not the only way to generate money.

As mentioned, it helped gain recognition and thus the stock went up. And, I'm sure, by many times what the whole DeepBlue program cost.


Now, because, with a rematch, they'd "have little to gain and much to lose" gets much closer.

A. If they won again, it doesn't prove much other than that it wasn't a fluke.

B. If they lost, they get some press, but in an unfavorable, if light-hearted, light.

C. In the event of B., a third rematch, if they won, would receive far less press than A. did, and would be thus of much less value, stock-wise. And if they lost again, forget it.


When Kasparov said this, and I do remember him thinking there was a human in there overriding some decisions (some other human-computer matches allowed for 1 or more humans to override particularly stupid computer decisions as part of the rules, so it isn't unknown) I did wonder, as the AI issues w.r.t. chess playing and computers are well-known, and well-studied.

The long and the short of it, though, is he shouldn't have lead with his chin and rushed it.


My favorite quote of his, "The best chess computers can beat mundane Grandmasters. But not me and Karpov!"
 
I was actually reading about this recently. I thought Kasparov was just being a sore loser. At later interviews he admitted that today's programs seem to have a personality of their own. I've read a lot about Kasparov lately and I noticed that he is very paranoid. A lot of chess champions seem to be.

For example, during Krammik's match his opponent thought he was going to the bathroom too much so he wanted controls placed. If you look at Kasparov and Karpov history you will see similar things.

Here is an interview with one of Deep Blue's engineers. Answers some questions raised here.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/05/murraycampbell_qa
 
It’s definitely a believable conspiracy theory, if any of you have ever heard of The TurkWP (not the one from The Sarah Connor Chronicles).

But of course that doesn’t necessarily make it true.
 
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The Turk from the Sarah Connor Chronicles (AKA Terminator, The TV Show) was named after the old mechanical Turk, and deliberately so, as mentioned in the show itself.
 
Cuddles said:
...As for the conspiracy, how can anyone possibly claim that a computer could not have made a particular move? A computer can make any move a human can. Neither I nor Kasparov have access to Deep Blue's program, so we can't comment on how likely it was to make a particular move, but there would certainly be nothing ruling out any move completely.
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Computers can make any move a human can, but that doesn't mean a computer running a specific program can make any given move in some situation. A decision tree is a form of finite state machine (someone correct me, I'm no expert...), and as far as I know they're by definition predictable, so it's distinctly possible that with the logs someone could have ruled out the computer making a particular decision.

Maybe Kasparov could recognise particular patterns in its 'thought', and spotted this as an aberration. More likely, in my mind, he's as crazy as... well... a professional chess player.
 
Cuddles said:
If I were a betting person, I'd bet against it. Unless we actually manage to develop quantum computers, we won't have the computing power to brute force Go in the forseeable future. Programming is another matter and it's certainly possible someone will come up with a clever way of doing it. However, I really doubt it will be in the next five years, if at all. Not least because there are very few people even trying, Go just doesn't have the popularity chess does.
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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.
 
huw-l said:
You lose the bet :)
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Crap. You see, this is why I'm not a betting person.

It would be interesting to know a bit more about this. I notice that they actually played four games, and it was only the fourth, which was the actual exhibition match, that the computer won. The obvious question is how consistently the computer could actually win. Was that a one-off fluke, or could it consistently win at least a fraction of games?

On the plus side, this does support at least part of my point. As you note, this is not a particularly remakable supercomputer, it was advances in programming rather than computing power that have made the difference.

I also note that my post was made on August 4th, while these games were played on the 5th (at least three were, the fourth may have been later). Clearly there's some kind of conspiracy involved here.
 
Beerina said:
The Turk from the Sarah Connor Chronicles (AKA Terminator, The TV Show) was named after the old mechanical Turk, and deliberately so, as mentioned in the show itself.
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++postcount

Come back when you have something relevant to add to the topic.
 
Cuddles said:
Another point is that making a computer beat a human at chess just isn't that impressive. Chess is a relatively simple game, and once computers were invented there was never really any doubt that they would one day be able to beat us, since even without clever programing it would be possible to just use brute force. Deep Blue was an interesting test to see if we had reached that point yet, with the conclusion that we have just about, but it's still in the realm of supercomputers and is by no means certain. There's really nothing to be gained by showing that computers can still beat people at chess.

On the other hand, a computer that could beat a master at something like Go would be a serious achievement, and is something that no-one is sure would be possible no matter how powerful computers get, since the amount of calculations required to brute force it are so many orders of magnitude higher.

As for the conspiracy, how can anyone possibly claim that a computer could not have made a particular move? A computer can make any move a human can. Neither I nor Kasparov have access to Deep Blue's program, so we can't comment on how likely it was to make a particular move, but there would certainly be nothing ruling out any move completely.
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I know this has been discussed, and I'm not surprised that there's a computer out there that can handle Go calculations. I just wanted to comment on the illogic of, on the one hand, accepting that the finite number of moves for chess could be handled by a computer, yet thinking that Go, OR ANY GAME WITH FINITE NUMBER OF MOVES, could not be crunched. Time was, back in the 50s and 60s, when many said that a computer would never be able to handle the variations on chess, either.

Sooner or later, if it's merely a question of numbers and brute computing power, some machine will do it.

Not rubbing your nose in the development of the Go-playing computer. Just that it seems to me that your post was heading towards one conclusion and you got to another.
 
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Foolmewunz said:
I know this has been discussed, and I'm not surprised that there's a computer out there that can handle Go calculations. I just wanted to comment on the illogic of, on the one hand, accepting that the finite number of moves for chess could be handled by a computer, yet thinking that Go, OR ANY GAME WITH FINITE NUMBER OF MOVES, could not be crunched. Time was, back in the 50s and 60s, when many said that a computer would never be able to handle the variations on chess, either.

Sooner or later, if it's merely a question of numbers and brute computing power, some machine will do it.

Not rubbing your nose in the development of the Go-playing computer. Just that it seems to me that your post was heading towards one conclusion and you got to another.
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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.
 
A bit of info about Kasparov's character in big matches:

1. When playing against a bunch of internet voters in "Kasparov vs. The World," when the game got really tough, he accused one of the young advisors of being in cahoots with the Russian Grandmaster School. To my knowledge the girl has since published her own analysis and how hard she worked on the game, refuting that rather batty claim.

2. Kasparov later claimed that Deep Blue had not beaten him because one of his blunders was in a position that was later found out to be drawn. This is of course completely illogical, because it means that if chess is solved to be a draw, then every game ever played is a draw because they actually started from a "drawn position." Victory is determined by the decisions the player makes over the board, not what's discovered later with much deeper analysis.

So we know he does this regularly in questionable circumstances and that he uses illogical arguments.
 
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