The Chess Master And The Computer

Garry Kasparov On Chess Metaphors

Thirteen years after Deep Blue beat him at chess, Garry Kasparov has written a long, thoughtful article about humanity's search for a meaning behind the event. Manages to cram in quite a lot of insights about both artificial intelligence in general, and the way the game of chess has changed among human opponents. As someone with a small fondness for chess and a large fondness for AI, I enjoyed it a lot.

There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top-level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

More on gambling and random seeds

I always appreciate it when people write in with questions about something I've posted before. Gives me an excuse to keep this blog at least somewhat active.

Joe in Illinois writes:

Enjoyed reading your article on google regarding how to set a seed and randomness. Would different seeds contain different overall results. For example, some people would argue that a simple Jacks or Better video poker game returning 99.54% (in the long run, whatever that is) is still not purely random because the maker must still set this % ( over time), So would/could some seeds produce more winning combinations, maybe with fewer overall winning numbers in the seed. Players would not recognize one seed starting or ending. The next seed would/could have say, only 16% of winning combinations. Some people are overly concerned with this RNG, I say it's just doing its job, running constantly. But I also think that the player should hope for a positive seed, along with some luck and knowledge.

The short answer is, yes, different random seeds would lead to better or worse luck. But in the long run, with a good random algorithm, it wouldn't matter to you. Hoping for a "good" string of numbers coming from the RNG makes neither more nor less sense than hoping for good luck when you sit down at a physical card table.

Look at it this way. If you take a video recording of your session at a poker game, obviously you'll draw more good hands than bad hands sometimes. If you took different videos on successive days, and later you compared the tapes, then you could say "Oh look: on day one I had a lucky streak, and on day two I had an unlucky streak." But that's just the way random numbers actually behave: it's a rare string of randoms that don't show signs of patterns that appear meaningful but aren't.

Since the nature of a correctly designed random number generator is to simulate real random numbers, of course an RNG will create those same apparent patterns. But as long as there is no way for you to reverse engineer the algorithm or figure out what the seed actually was, hoping for a certain pattern is not much more than superstition.

Another interesting thing to note is that the nature of probability is that the larger your sample set is, the more likely it is to confirm to the expected distribution. In other words, if you only play three games in a row, it's not entirely unlikely that you could get a lucky streak and win all three games. Of course, it's slightly more likely that you would lose all three games; but still, if you believe in luck, betting a lot on a small number of hands makes some sense. The longer you play, though, the less the game's outcome will look like a sequence of wild streaks, and the more it will look like a typical bell curve distribution of some sort.

Thus, if you play 5000 hands of video poker, you are almost guaranteed to gradually lose money at the expected rate, as very lucky or very unlucky streaks will tend to cancel each other out.