PART 1 • Some thoughts on kasparov vs. Deep blue
SO WHAT ' S MISSING?
The tools are all here: a primitive type of heuristic questioning in the form of chessplaying programs plus the database search functions. The number of different types of database searches has increased as well over the last couple of years. Now in ChessBase you can do position searches that include what ' s on the board, what ' s not on the board, and what might be on the board( for example, White ' s King on either f1 or g1). We can do material searches, right down to opposite-colored Bishops. We can even search for material sacrifices.
The hardware has made a difference too. Five years ago, when a 486 / 25 was considered a miracle of technology, 50,000 games was a big database. These days it ' s considered to be laughably small. Databases of more than a million games can be compiled and accessed quickly, easily, and cheaply. On my Pentium 133 I can do a search of 600,000 games off of a CD( which is slower than accessing them from a hard drive) in less time than it takes to go get a cup of coffee.
So what ' s missing? What keeps all of this from being a complete expert system?
One school of thought says « nothing ». In Englebart ' s original vision, humans and computers worked in an integrated domain, sharing the workload. Humans defined the problem, computers helped them find the answers.
The tools to do that are in place. But researchers in expert systems want to take this one step further. They want the computer to be able to define the problem.
Let ' s look at an example. Suppose you ' re playing the White side of the Caro-Kann Advance and you keep getting your butt kicked game after game. The logical steps here are to do database searches to see what strong players are doing with the opening plus have playing programs do analysis of your games to see where your weakness lies.
Suppose, though, even after doing that, you ' re still unable to interpret the data and figure out the problem. Wouldn ' t it be wonderful to feed your games as well as collected GM data to a computer and have it spit out an answer in plain English?
That ' s the second school of thought, the missing piece of the expert systems puzzle. Remarkable as the present tools are, they still can ' t slap one in the face and say « No, stupid! Not that-- this!!!» They can ' t take the workload completely off one ' s shoulders.
45 chessking. com