Chess and AI, man vs. machine
Source: Computer History Museum
Video: 2 hr 5 min 57 sec - Jun 22, 2004
URL: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1583888480148765375
In the early days of Artificial Intelligence, chess was a major focus because it was thought to be a route to understanding problem-solving abilities in general. It was a well defined game in which you could measure the quality of AI play.
A chess champion himself says: "First chess grandmasters came to AI matches to laugh. Secondly they came to watch, but finally they came to learn."
The prediction of a world-class AI chess player was wrong on timescale. But its a very hard prediction to make. Problem spaces are enormous, 'searching the entire maze' is impossible because of cpu power, time and memory constraints. So complete brute force is fruitless. Using pruning (alphabeta) allowed for much more efficient calculations and most algorithms use this technique to reduce the calculation work.
To achieve more, we can wait for processors to become faster, or find a way to use more knowledge. Investing in computer clusters is also an option (they speak of a dichotomy 'knowledge' vs. 'search'). I do believe that each can be improved separately, one doesn't inhibit the other so the 'versus' simply calls for one side to become dominant, not the other to be reduced or left as inferior.
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