Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2281-85 (24-28 September 2012) Weekly Comics Discussion Thread
PthariensFlame:
--- Quote from: Pilchard123 on 04 Oct 2012, 10:12 ---The search tree is probably the biggest problem for chess engines. The bigger it gets, the harder it is to keep memory use in check.
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You can actually run a search over the leaves of an ephemeral rose tree in O(depth) worst-case space, as long as you're OK with O(n) worst-case time. That might let you have a "perfect" chess engine that was just fairly slow.
Method of Madness:
--- Quote from: jmucchiello on 04 Oct 2012, 10:06 ---If I were board, I'd attempt this "challenge".
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Near Lurker:
--- Quote from: jmucchiello on 04 Oct 2012, 10:06 ---... doing exactly as they were programmed to do, and only if such code is part of the program. Chess programs do not need to be written such that they learn anything. The entire thing can be just a board position search with a fixed evaluation algorithm.
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I'm sorry, but I know this to be false. Or at least, to the extent it's true, it's true because the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented - what programs have learnt can be reapplied. Human players also "do exactly as they were programmed to do," by the laws of nature. Our intellect isn't special, in any way that a computer can't be. It really isn't.
--- Quote from: jmucchiello on 04 Oct 2012, 10:06 ---Seriously, a half-way decent programmer can probably knock out the core of a Chess playing program and hand tune it to play well against "average to good" Chess players in about two to three weeks. Most of that time will be spent on pruning the decision tree and memory leaks and little of the time would involve "playing" Chess. Chess is not complex. It just has a large number of possible board positions. If I were board, I'd attempt this "challenge".
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Go right ahead. I expect you'll find on your hands a novice, on the level of someone who's just read a book on chess sitting down to his first game; I'm quite confident anyone who's actually worked on a chessbot would tell you the same.
While you're at it, try your hand at writing a go simulator. After all, simple as chess is, go is far simpler - should be easy!
Is it cold in here?:
--- Quote from: Near Lurker on 04 Oct 2012, 19:01 --- Our intellect isn't special, in any way that a computer can't be. It really isn't.
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It's only a hypothesis that humans are Turing-equivalent.
in fact, our ability to maintain contradictory axioms is something that would cause a logic system to explode.
Near Lurker:
1: Logic systems in that sense are so not the same thing. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to code for cognitive dissonance.
2: Turing-equivalence in the sense that's debated is irrelevant. Most scientists would agree that our minds accord to physical laws, which appear to be within the bounds of computability, at least with a random number generator. (One should certainly hope they are, or this whole "science" thing's been kind of a waste of time.) Therefore, our minds can't do anything a computer can't do, barring an immaterial soul.
Checking, that's not actually true; there is serious debate over whether physical laws are computable. However, our models of quantum mechanics thus far strongly suggest that they are. It's not proven, but it never could be proven, and by the nature of computability, likely (though not necessarily) can't be disproven if false. So for now, I would say that it's a safe assumption that our physical brains can't do anything that can't be modelled, at least enough that arguments that amount to "but my intuition I'm better than lines of code!" can be summarily dismissed.
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