Re: Re: Re: Artificial Intelligence Programming in Perl

[ariels]

Of course there is a difference between how humans play chess and how computers play chess. Consider: How many positions does Deep Blue examine to decide on its next move? -- A quick search on the web seems to suggest 250 million moves. A second. How many positions does a human grandmaster examine to decide on its next move? 100_000 sounds like a huge overestimate (and would be unsupported by any psychological research). In the 80s, David Levy (I think) investigated human chessplayers; he found that for "real" positions (i.e. those occurring in a real game) masters can produce a good move in much less time that for "unreal" positions. Perhaps humans have some capacity for playing chess beyond alpha-beta pruning with a good ordering heuristic??

This hardly points at some difference in heuristics betwee

Humans aren't slightly better than computers at chess (and much better than computers at go) because they analyze more moves. On the contrary: they're better despite analyzing only an insignificant number of moves!