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pfren, how do you know? This looks like a complete and utter assumption to me.

Oh, I see, you justify it with common sense. Ok, but what you call "common sense" involves assuming something to be true simply because it sounds natural to you. That's good for making a hypothesis, but if you don't test it, you don't have much scope to measure the accuracy of your speculations -- they may be rational, but speculation is very open-ended.

Common sense rejected continental drift. Nearly everyone was absolutely wrong, and the man that was criticized for bringing it up was quite right (most likely). Doesn't that say a lot about the problem of assumption that makes up common sense?

Hello All,

This might be of interest to the group. Back in 1999 Master Stephen Ham went head to head against a computer in correspondence chess. The machine won--even back then. Anyway, the coverage is excellent. I hope you find this helpful.

Cheers,

brotherbear380

Just don't tell him the world is round.

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 Yes, like lack of pay for devoting several months to one game. I think that would be enough. And who is willing to pony up enough cash to entice someone to devote all that time?

Interesting comment pfren... My common sense tells me that a computer rated at 3300 would beat 2800 rated humans every time. 

I guess your common sense is a little bit different ;-)

Give the computer 2 days to think per move vs an unaided human with 2 days to think per move and my money is still on the top engines.

If Houdini is 400-500 points stronger than any GM, why shouldn't it win at any time control?  Otherwise, the Glicko system, or the Elo system, makes no sense probabilistically.

Do people really think that old saw about "tactical play versus positional play" has any meaning, when the (free) silicone opponent is 500 points stronger than Vishy?

50 years ago, Herbert Simon, a Noble Prize Winner in Economics, and Professor at Carneige Mellon, predicted that (in 5 years) a young child, using a hand-held-computer, would be able to beat the World Chess Champion.

Simon was wrong by about 45 years.

But that day has (now) arrived, has it not?

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 But do human ratings vs. computer ratings mean the same thing?

The highest ICCF rating is in the 2700's, but obviously an ICCF centaur would beat an OTB 2800 GM almost every time.

I assume that the rating systems are the same, otherwise bragging that an engine has a rating of 3300 would be pretty pointless.

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 No reason to be surprised.  Chess engines lack the ability to play positionally.  Top GM's can steer the game into positional waters, and have a chance. 

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 How could they possibly be the same? Engines get there ratings by playing engines, not humans. I'm having a hard time finding information on this, but I'm not great at researching with the internet.

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Only because humans can't compete at that level. Hence the 3300 Elo rating.

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 Top GMs do not have much motivation to devote large amounts of time and resources to preparing for a match against a computer.  This would probably involve significant work developing strategies to beat a specific engine, I would imagine that it is still possible to do this but the fact is no one really cares anymore, you don't hear about mathematicians trying to prove that they can crunch numbers better than a calculator.

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As far as the question of human understanding goes, people overlook a basic principle, whilst I am not much of a chess player I can see the philosophical issue here.  Positional principles are a set of abstractions imposed on the basic logical framework of chess to enhance human ability, they are not inherent in the game as such but they allow humans to make calculations which would otherwise be impossible.  A human doesn't 'understand' chess any more than a computer does, they just have a different way of calculating.  The machine's method, while much less efficient, is more exact, hence why machine's surpass man's ability quite easily once their efficiency is improved and their calculating ability increased.  They still have their weaknesses, but soon these will be too small to exploit and right now there is not much motivation for top players to try.

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 I'm confused about what you are trying to say?  I have highlighted it in red. 

How is "positional" chess not an inherent part of the game?  Advanced pawns on one side of the board is an inherent part of the game (more space)  Just as controlling squares is an inherent part of the game.  If i am misunderstanding what you are saying my apologies, but please explain. 

What it means is that all chess is objectively is a matrix of possibilities. Positional concepts are subjective models that humans use to describe this matrix more efficiently, but they remain inexact models not a representation of the objective reality of chess, which is a mathematical function albeit an extremely complex one. Consider the following example, when I look out of my window I see a tree in my front yard, in reality this setting consists of trillions of atoms each with its own structure arranged into molecules whose composition differentiates matter, this is arranged into biological organisms whose complexity and functions I cannot begin to imagine, but all I see is a tree and a patch of grass. This is a subjective model which reduces all of the complexity of that setting to something I can comprehend, which is adequate for my purposes. This is exactly what happens when one looks at a chess board and says, "my knight is attacked, I will move it to the center of the board to maximize the number of squares it controls". All of the unfathomable complexity of the game tree is reduced to a simple formula, and the concrete reasons for the knight being there may not be recognized yet. The computer solves the problem a completely different way, by trying to calculate through as much of the complexity as it possibly can, eventually the advantage of being able to calculate faster outweighs the advantage of not having to calculate as much, which is why computers have surpassed humans. One can see then, that it is not really a question of understanding, but simply two different approaches to a single problem. A human will try to improve efficiency by simplifying the problem, which has the disadvantage of being inexact, whereas a computer will try to be exact by maximizing calculation, which has the disadvantage of being inefficient.

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 That is a long winded answer, that doesnt explain why "positional" chess isnt an inherent part of the game.  Positional chess is as much a part of chess as tactical play is.  And this is where chess engines destroy human opponents. 

The irony of this discussion is each position only has one game theoretic

value (W,L, or D) but has a myriad of values due to the limitations of search

and the strengths and styles of the participants.  

A chess game is a series of moves, a positional idea or a tactic is a concept used by humans to describe those moves, it's not part of the objective material of chess.

Engines still have evaluation functions though, which includes positional elements. When they plonk a Knight on e5, they don't have calculated up to a material gain just yet, but their evaluation function takes into account that a centralized Knight is worth slightly more than a Knight on a rim for example (all other things being more or less equal at the end of the tree).

But of course, the calculation power is what makes the difference.

True, look at it this way. Whilst a top GM probably can't defeat a good engine, their ability to evaluate a position is still at least as good as a computer's in most cases. Considering that they can only be calculating a tiny fraction of the number of moves that an engine would to evaluate the same position, we can assume that they are using a more advanced form of modeling than the eval function of an engine.

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Or at least 24 times out of 25 (according to the ELO rating vs win-probability table).