Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
the programs are not yet dominating is that, although the strength of the
best programs has been rising slowly and continues to rise, human Chess
strength is also rising. But it can only be a matter of a few years at most
before Kasparov 15 and his super-grandmaster colleagues will be pleased
to win a single game out of six or eight in a match against the world's
strongest programs. Kasparov himself forsees the day when one such win
will be treated by the human player as a triumph!
Checkers (Draughts)
ThegameofCheckers 16 is very much simpler than Chess, with fewer
pieces, fewer piece types and fewer squares of the board on which to play.
Because of these smaller numbers there are far fewer possible board posi-
tions in Checkers than there are in Chess and the goal of creating a World
Championship level program was therefore, for many years, widely as-
sumed to be much easier to achieve in Checkers than in Chess.
The first Checkers program to attract the attention of the public was
developed by Arthur Samuel at IBM in 1952. His program was ini-
tially written for an IBM 701, the corporation's first computer that could
store a program in its memory. When Samuel's program was about to
be demonstrated for the first time, Thomas J. Watson, the founder and
president of IBM, remarked that the demonstration would raise the price
of IBM stock 15 points. It did.
Samuel upgraded his program in 1954 when he added two learning
mechanisms. The program was able to learn from experience and thereby
to improve its own evaluation of positions. The simpler of Samuel's two
learning methods was rote learning. Whenever it carried out a search
of the game tree, Samuel's program stored the current position, together
with its score. If the same position arose as a leaf position of the tree
during a later search, even in a later game, the program would already
know the score for that position as derived from the earlier tree search.
This meant that evaluating the same position again was both unneces-
sary, because its value was already known, and less accurate, because the
known value was based on a tree search rather than merely the result of a
“static” evaluation.
15 In March 2005 Kasparov announced his retirement from professional tournament play, but said
that he still planned to play in some events for fun. Hopefully he will, from time to time, accept the
challenge to play the top programs.
16 In the U.K. and the British Commonwealth this game is called Draughts.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search