Malathion 07:58, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC) Would it do any good to mention the fact that Go is already a fine example of a board game where computers are still vastly worse than the best humans? Go seems to share many of the qualities that are described here, in particular extremely long range planning, a wide choice of moves for any given position, and a heavy weight placed on positional considerations rather than material gain.
- Yes, I think it would make sense to mention Go as the prime example of a game computers play poorly relative to humans. But apparently there are others such as Havannah, Octi and Twixt. I almost want to create a page "List of two-player abstract strategy games at which the best humans beat the best programs". --Fritzlein 04:50, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Trap squares
I think more explanation is needed on the trap squares, and how these can be used to remove pieces from the board. Since the concept of a trap square is quite uncommon in board games.
From what I have seen, there only seems to be one paragraph explaining the trap square and even that is buried in the middle where it is not easily recognized.
--82.3.32.72 13:36, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- That's a fair criticism. I recall that when I learned the rules myself, the trap square was explained late in the presentation, even though it was something I was very curious about. It might even pay to explain that there is no replacement capture, as in chess. If you can edit the article to make it clearer to the average reader, please go ahead. Otherwise I will see if I can think of a way to restructure things to cater to people who are totally unfamiliar with the game. --Fritzlein 23:05, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
AI & Chess
"The successful quest to build a world-championship-caliber chess program has contributed essentially nothing to the field of artificial intelligence": huh? sure it has, although people don't seem to listen. Computers don't think like humans do; a machine that can do millions of multiplications a second and store gigabytes of information [i]exactly[/i], but for which fuzzy pattern matching is a non-trivial operation does things differently from a machine that is excellent at fuzzy pattern matching, but has trouble storing more than a few bytes exactly or doing [i]any[/i] multiplication. Funny that. A winning Arimaa program will demonstrate just that, IMO. That's my POV, but it helps show that this statement is POV. --Prosfilaes 03:47, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- My own POV is that computers are already intelligent in many reasonable senses of the word. I watched on ICC when Kasparov was playing Deep Blue, and heard people objecting to comments like "Deep Blue thinks the bishop is worth more than the knight right now," objecting on the grounds that computers don't think, and to say that Deep Blue "thinks" anything is an abuse of language. I personally believe that it was and is an extremely natural use of language, and to insist that we not talk that way is pedantry. You and I probably agree more than we disagree about whether computers display intelligence.
- That said, I believe that my original statement in the article was not as subjective as you are making it out to be. The phrase "artificial intelligence" is coming to have a technical meaning which is divergent from my understanding of "intelligence". There is a community of people who are interested in making computers do certain things well that they don't do well at present, and who are as interested in how it is done as in what is done. To call that set of goals and techniques "artificial intelligence" is in some ways at odds with a common notion of intelligence, but less so than (for example) what ecomonists call "efficiency" is at odds with a common notion of efficiency. For you to object to the way in which artificial intelligence is used in a technical sense seems to me quite as pedantic as objections to saying that computers think.
- If there are more accurate words to use in these contexts than "think" and "artificial intelligence", then by all means substitute them for clarity. But to insert a "He believes" in front of the statement illuminates only that you had a difference of opinion, and doesn't illuminate your grounds for objecting. Am I right that you are not objecting to the statement of fact so much as taking exception to the way most people define artificial intelligence? Do you accept that strong chess programs are strong for reasons other than pattern recognition, learning from mistakes, using neural networks, self-modifying, or any of the hodge-podge of things that are lumped together under the name of artificial intelligence? If so, then let's get this issue straightened out in some other way than the current edit. Let's recognize it as a fact that chess was conquered by computers in a way that AI people didn't find useful or applicable to the problems that interested them. --Fritzlein 07:06, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- P.S. It is worth noting that Bomb, the best Arimaa-playing program at present, does not use any AI techniques (as commonly defined), but rather uses techniques which have worked well for chess. They don't work as well for Arimaa as they do for chess, but so far they work better than anything else that has been tried.
- This is a quick response--your message needs much more thought to respond in full--but I had AI in college, and one of the sections was on alpha-beta trees. If AI has a technical meaning that doesn't include alpha-beta trees, I would say that that technical meaning is too esoteric for wikipedia. --Prosfilaes 23:05, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Hmmm... maybe the definition of AI that I've learned isn't as widespread as I think. Just out of curiosity, do alpha-beta trees have applications outside of computer gaming? --Fritzlein 05:00, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I don't see how alpha-beta trees could have application out of a game; it's a pretty narrow technique. I'm going to try something on the page. --Prosfilaes 07:09, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Fantastic, I love the current edit. --Fritzlein 01:41, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
