Computer Go continues to improve, and recently two programs on KGS have reached 5d on KGS! First CrazyStone, using the account 'bonobot', although it disappeared after a few days and drifted back down to 4d. Next Zen19D appeared and reached 5d, and it seems to be holding that level consistently.

How long do you think it will be until the first bot reaches a consistent 6d on KGS? It was only August 2010 that Zen was the first bot to consistently hold a 3d rating, and now less than a year later it is 5d!

Here is a history of bot ratings over time: http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSBotRatings

I'm confused. If so, why couldn't they get a computer to beat that low-dan player this past winter? Are the KGS bots using extremely expensive hardware?

Are they playing with low time limits?

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Part of the idea behind the challenge was that a human could learn the computer's weaknesses, thus beating a bot that might maintain a higher rating against a large field of (undedicated) opponents.

Also, these bots are not the one that was chosen, though I don't know if they're substantially better than MFoG or not.

An older thread had a great deal of discussion: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2646&hilit=shodan+bet

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Yes these bots are playing with fast times -- 9x:15. Typically they lose about 1 stone when they play something like 30min main + 5x:30 overtime.

About the Tromp bet, the hardware Zen19D is running on is too expensive to qualify for that bet. Also the time controls would favor Tromp even more than 30min main. And finally a huge factor is Tromp would be playing much more seriously than the typical opponent on KGS!

Despite the caveat about blitz time controls, 5d is still quite amazing! Less than two years ago Zen was 3d under similar time controls.

Yes.

This makes me wonder: are bots allowed on DGS?

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Zen reached 1d only about two years ago. The progress the bots are making is stunning. I believe better-than-human play is not that far off, maybe 10 years.

6d this year won't surprise me.

This is from the Zen19D info... ("me" = someone named Hideki Katoh)
Q: What is Zen19D?
A: Zen19D is a version of Zen19, runs on a mini-cluster of 6 pcs (a 6-core Xeon W5680/4 GHz, two 4-core i7 920/3.2 GHz, and three 4-core Core2Quad/3 GHz) connected via a GbE LAN. Although Zen19 is a prototype of a commercial product, Zen19D is being developed for academic research by team DeepZen, a joint project of ZenAuthor and me.

Q: What does D stand for?
A: Distributed version, or DeepZen.

Q: How strong is it?
A: Estimated 5d for blitz and 4d for longer games

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It would be fun to see a Malkovich game with Zen19D if it has any kind of tracing on how it is weighting its moves.

this is IMO very sad.... Chess lost all sparkle for me once I realised computers were becoming dominant.

Nothing changes ALA programs do only use sheer calculation power. Humans will have to "justify" their superiority only when computers start to explain their decisions by human-readable reasoning and can maintain their hard- and software alone.

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While I was teaching the game to a friend of mine, my mother from the other room:
"Cutting? Killing? Poking out eyes? What the hell are you playing?"

What goes unmentioned in Kurzweil's comment is that people once thought that once we had a chess playing computer, we would have computers that recognized speech, had vision and could write a novel. But it turned out that chess was vastly easier than those, and really didn't lead to much progress on those fronts. So the earlier valuation of a chess playing computer was based on massive factual errors.

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Robert, that's a somewhat naive way to think about intelligence, whether natural or artificial. You are making some assumptions both about the current state of the art and the possibilities.

a) explain "why" in human understandable terms
You are assuming that none of the existing programs can do this? Just because few of the programs have been given this capability doesn't make that so. What I believe isn't possible at the present time is giving a why for "why is move A (which has x, y, z "go reasons" behind it) better than move B (which has u, v, w go reasons behind it)". In other words, in human understandable terms, why in this instance are x, y, and z more important than u, v, and w. This of course assumes that you don't consider "human understandable" the concept that if out of 100 games played between opponents of equal skill from position A if one side wins more often than out of 100 games played from position B then for that side position A is likely better than position B (and even more likely if that is true for 1000 games).

Regardless of how a go playing program has selected X as its next move (the move it thinks best) it could then turn around and "waste time" analyzing X in terms of the possible "go reasons" for the move. Feature could be added even to the "pure" MCTS programs if somebody wanted to so.

b) Some forms of AI are essentially "programming themselves" and cannot possibly explain why/how. To understand this you need to understand that a "program" can be the combination of "code" (process and/or function evaluation) and "data" and the behavior of the program might depend very heavily on the data.

You are perhaps going to assume that this data is supplied by us humans? Not necessarily so. Look up the form of AI that goes by the designation "neural net". Here all that is necessary is some way to judge/evaluate how well the "program" has performed its assigned task (the task it is supposed to learn) and then random peturbations of the data can lead to evolution of better and better performance as the neural net learns to perform the task. Not meaningful in this case to ask "why" this set of data works (other sets might work equally well).

You think not? You think a justification of "why does this set of data work" necessary to prove intelligence? Then kindly explain what about the details of the connections between the nerve cells in your brain lets you perform some task. More than "as I learned the task connections were broken and made until now, with what remains, it just works".

Actually the goal in computer chess has shifted to use less power than before. Computers stronger than Deep Blue now run on mobile phones. Pocket Fritz 4 is at Grand Master level and analyses (if I remember correctly) a few million times less positions than Deep Blue.

Computers can and do train people by showing variations and giving positional judgement. Even champions use them.

Most people would like to think otherwise of course, that computers are dumb and sheer power.

I think it is a safer and more relaxed attitude to just admit that computers are better chess players and "understand" chess better, and that this will apply to go at some point. Board games are a minor use for human intelligence. If we take it too badly that computers are better than us here, what will happen when they will surpass humans in the really important stuff?

More generally (on task that require intelligence)

Yes, back then we thought we'd soon have computers that could interpet speech, etc. But that was because we were rather naive about the difficulty of the task. In the process we have learned a great deal about human languages and how in practice they depend on far more than rules of language and the meaning of words.

An example?

"The chickens are ready to eat"
"The steaks are ready to eat"

The first you find ambiguous but the second not. But it's not by any meaning of words or rules of language by which you determine that the steaks must be cooked, couldn't be hungry. You've just called your entire knowledge about how things behave in the real world into play.

Kurzweil does comment on this belief in his book, but the professional community has long since abandoned the notion that chess (or go for that matter) are the Holy Grail or computing or AI. Sure, they are important steppingstones, but the accepted test for intelligence is still the Turing Test (or variations thereof) According to Kurzweil 'Strong AI' will have been developed by 2030 and will have surpassed all (unaugmented) human intelligence by 2040.

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While I was teaching the game to a friend of mine, my mother from the other room:
"Cutting? Killing? Poking out eyes? What the hell are you playing?"

I have a hard time seeing the point you're making, Mike. I agree that we had naive expectations about how hard those problems would be.

Alternately, you can say that we simplified the problem space with chess. Very early on, I think people assumed you would teach a computer to play chess by teaching it to think it like a human.

In one way or another, people had assumed problems like chess were more tightly coupled to general purpose AI, and they weren't.

(Btw: that last paragraph steps into a minefield in philosophy of language. You could argue forever about whether you can understand words like 'steak' and 'eat' without realizing that a steak couldn't be hungry. I recommend against such discussions unless you take a perverse pleasure in them. Without stepping further into that minefield--we haven't even really taught computers the meaning of words, or the rules of language, so I think you're not getting the obstacles quite right).

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@Mnemonic Well, that's the reason why the importance of chess was downgraded. And it's a good reason!

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