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Game Theory 4: The Human Factor |
The past few months the debate about Man vs. Machine has made headlines again as three big exhibitions have been played pitting man against computer. The first happened last September as US Chess champion Larry Christiansen was defeated by a desktop computer program Chessmaster 9000. Final Score Chessmaster two and a half, Christiansen one and a half. While completely unofficial, it proves that at the very least, off the shelf chess programs really can achieve Grandmaster status.
Then in October, World Champion Vladimir Kramnik faced off against Deep Fritz promoted as a sequel to Kasparov vs. Deep Blue in 1997. The results of the competition was a tie, four games to four games.
This month Kasparov himself is facing a rematch against a computer called Deep Junior. Details are here. So far game one was won by Kasparov, and game 2 was played to a draw, and Deep Junior won game 3. The final three all ended in draws for a 3-3 tie.
Are all of these signs that computer chess players are superior to man?
Well, no actually.
Hidden behind all of the man vs. machine debate is a deep irony that is not really being reported. All four of these computer programs (Chessmaster and the three Deeps) have achieved Grandmaster status not by brute force analysis of all game possibilities, but by simulating human behavior.
You may be wondering why all of these chess programs have the first name of "Deep". Well, the first computer to be considered a grand master was called "Deep Thought" after the fictional super computer in the classic novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which according to the novel calculated the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything which turned out to be 42.
When the team that created Deep Thought was hired by IBM to continue their research, they called the project Deep Blue since IBM is often called "Big Blue". As far as I know neither Deep Fritz nor Deep Junior have any connection to either Deep Thought or Deep Blue, but the tradition has been established.
Deep Thought played Kasparov back in 1989 and was soundly defeated by the human. Based on the kind of game it played, it was a true brute force player, looking at all the possible moves and determining by a formula which is the likeliest to best strategic move.
Humans don't think like that, they use experience and instincts, and they learn quickly from their mistakes. A brute force computer program has no way of realizing it made a mistake.
So what changed between 1989 and 1997, did the increase in calculation capacity make Deep Blue that much better than Deep Thought? Not hardly, in fact the new generation programs run on much less sophisticated hardware than Deep Blue did. Deep Blue used 64 processors, calculating 200,000,000 moves per second, while Deep Junior only has 8 processors and calculates a mere 3 million chess moves per second, yes Deep Junior is every much Deep Blue's equal when it comes to chess.
The big difference between Thought and Blue has to do with the software it was running. While I cannot prove this, I (and many others) believe Deep Blue was programmed to consider previous games played by Kasparov in the past. In other words, Kasparov was defeated by a more efficient simulation of himself!
Kasparov himself was of a similar opinion. "Deep Blue was more about PR, selling the story, scaring the human race," he said to reporters before his latest match, "This machine [Deep Junior] is a real opponent. It's not hiding behind a curtain."
Regardless of outcome, the best computer chess players are merely imitating human players, which says a lot about the real nature of "intelligence" as compared to number crunching.
As I stated in part 1 of the game theory series, Chess is a two-player, non random, perfect knowledge game. As a result, it should have an ideal strategy that will result in either a win or a draw every time. So, far this strategy has proven very elusive, with the computers no closer to finding it than the humans.
The Human Factor in Simulation Games
In part 2 of game theory, I mentioned I was a fan of The Sims by Electronic Arts. In The Sims the computer controlled characters behave almost life like simply by following simple rules that govern their behavior.
Well in the past month, Electronic Arts released an online version of The Sims called The Sims Online. In this version there are practically no computer controlled characters, every character is controlled by a real person playing over the Internet. The result is a very different game than the computer controlled variety.
On the desktop game you controlled everything, Sims were happy or miserable at your command. With Sims Online, you only control one Sim, and he or she has to become happy or miserable by negotiating with other Sims controlled by other real people. There is a whole economic structure at work, and since Sims are mirrors of their owners, there are friendly people, control freaks, snobs, fun loving, workaholics, etc.
Behavior of the Sims in the desktop version may have had human like qualities, but the behavior was pretty predictable. Behavior of online Sims is entirely unpredictable because humans are really in control.
A few years ago, I was into playing "First Person Shoot-em-ups" or FPS games as they are popularly known. Doom and Duke Nukem were the popular games of the day, and I was as good as anyone in these games. Then I tried playing online "Death matches", where real players tried to kill each other. I never fared so well in these games. Sims Online is simply a less violent version of the same experience.
To Err is Human...
Human controlled players are smarter than the computer controlled variety, with one exception: Humans sometimes make mistakes. Computers can beat humans in two-player, non random, perfect knowledge games because Humans can be counted on to make mistakes along the way. Playing checkers against a computer is not fun, because the best you can hope for is a draw. Playing checkers against another person is fun, because humans make mistakes along the way allowing the possibility of victory.
Analysis by Chess experts of those games won by computers against grand master humans, is that in every case, the human player made an error somewhere along the way.
...To Really foul things up requires a Computer
Computers, on the other hand, are only as smart as the program they are running. The smartest computer players imitate humans only without the random mistakes. This makes the computers predictable, and since recognizing patterns is something we humans do instinctually, computers are often defeated in games of skill.
This all goes back to the artificial intelligence debate. A consistent theme in science fiction is the speculation that one day artificial intelligent personalities may one day be superior to humans. Considering how radically different humans and computers are, this scenario is highly unlikely. That computers are our superior in some tasks, such as rapid math calculation and maybe Chess, should not be a surprise.
There will always be things humans can do that computers cannot.
User Comment
While humans may never be eclipsed by computers, I'll bet on humans equipped with computers vs. humans without....which is where we are today and will continue to be in the future - humans with the nth generation of tech will (as a group) to best those with n-1th tech -Frank McGillicuddy
I agree, that is where we are headed. Portable computers with VR interfaces that we can wear are available now, in a decade widely available. Cyber implants will be available in the next 50 years no doubt. Who knows what is next.