I will admit that I know essentially nothing about Go, but it does seem like it’s the sort of game that will ultimately fall to Moore’s Law, just as chess did in its time.
Madden. The computer player sucks!
I thought there was a breakthrough of sorts recently - some software switched to a Monte Carlo method (similar to what I have seen computers do with Scrabble; they play a sizable number of games out from a particular position to determine the best move). I don’t think any computer is at Shodan yet, but they’re better than the 13 Kyu they seemed to be stuck at years ago.
I doubt computers would even be very good at playing preconstructed decks, if they weren’t given specific instruction on it. There are just too many subtleties in the interactions of even simple cards.
Bah, a real-time game is just a turn based game where the turn times trend towards zero :D.
Hearts? Spades? Euchre? Pinochle? Rook? Are there computers who play these games better than humans? Because I haven’t seen them if so.
I can usually crush the computer in any poker game I’ve tried. Computers aren’t great at bluffing or detecting bluffing.
i should ask again though - besides Chess and Go, has there been any serious effort given to make these AI to actually crush humans? it seems to me that developers would not spend too much time on the AI in games instead of multiplayer.
Well, that’s a good point.
I’m curious about the state of chess AIs vs. humans at this point. I would break my question down like this:
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Will the best chess AI always beat any human in a tournament?
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Will the best chess AI always beat any human in a single game? (I know this was not true in the second series of Deep Blue vs. Kasparov. IIRC, DB won 2, K won 1, and there were three draws.)
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If the computer will not necessarily win, can a human reliably play for a draw? IOW, could it be possible that human chess playing ability will remain high enough to draw against any AI for the foreseeable future?
BTW, chess and go definitely cannot be “solved” in the conventional sense with a digital computer. The solution tree would require all the atoms in the universe to store in any conceivable material format. It may be possible, however, in the future for a quantum computer to solve chess for any particular position and play perfectly.
Hmm. I should host a Dip game, RT. Maybe Facebook based.
You in?
Alas, no. I just don’t have the time for it these days. But thanks for asking!
One factor to consider is play against opponent weaknesses. Play may be considered “perfect” when any winnable game is won, and any drawable game is drawn, but a good player must also know how to induce opponent errors. For example, an excellent poker program might have a positive expectation against any individual player, but not be the fastest money winner at a table.
Nitpick: The number of chess positions is less than 10[sup]47[/sup]. The number of distinct possible games may be more than the universe’s atoms, but there would be no need to store them all – a few bits per possible position would suffice to prepare or depict the complete solution.
I thought that for a long time, too, but it turns out that smarter minds than I have already calculated some limits on the sorts of problems quantum computers can solve, and chess is provably outside of that space.
That said, though, it’s still conceivable that someone will someday find some very clever trick to solve chess without brute force, similarly (in principle) to how Nim is solved without brute force. It’s also conceivable (a lot more so) that, even without provably solving chess, computers will get so good at it that they’ll either always win with white or always draw with black, making the game, in practice, solved.
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It depends on the time control. The shorter the time control, the more favorable for the computer. Humans think slow by comparison, so it’s not so much a computer advantage as it is a human disadvantage. At standard time control (40 moves, 120 minutes+60minutes sudden death), I can say that the human will likely never, ever win. He can draw, though.
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Not at all. Chess itself has a problem with draws. There are many positions where a side can have a better position but not be able to convert it. So a Grandmaster has a little bit of room for error. By the way, Deep Blue is the equivalent of a car phone…completely obsolete and outclassed in every way. Today’s top engine is Houdini 3, though Houdini 4 was just released. Runners-up are Rybka, Komodo and Stockfish. Honorable mention to Deep Fritz.
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Depends on if you let the human research the engine first. Carlsen might be able to prepare a drawing line against a known opponent. I certainly have found a few against Houdini 4, but I’m not skilled enough to hold the draw once I’ve reached it. All you have to do is find closed positions and memorize how to keep them closed. Not that hard.
This is all assuming you’re using the top performance platform for the engine. If you install it on a phone and turn off Ponder (i.e. “think on human’s time”), yeah, you could beat it. Here’s a famous game where America’s #1 beats Rybka in 2008.
who will win in a game of Ping Pong? answer in about 3 hours. probably later if the site crashes.
website - http://www.kuka-timoboll.com/en/home/
youtube trailer - Timo Boll vs. KUKA robot - Teaser - YouTube
wow that was lame. i was expecting a real match and got a lousy, shaky cam commercial instead.
Years later and science has determined that computers can’t learn how to play Magic: the Gathering in a “perfect” way. That link leads to the actual research paper about it (which is a somewhat amusing read to see M:tG cards get tossed about in a research paper) but I’ll steal a few quotes from Kotaku to give you the gist of it:
I mean, that’s a given - MTG is as much about bluffing and knowing your opponent’s likely deck composition as it is about using your own cards and abusing the byzantine rules.
It’s amusing to see that the two first replies in this 5 years old thread are both obsolete by now.