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Topic: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?! (Read 5223 times) |
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OLTI
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The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« on: Mar 14th, 2006, 6:10am » |
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One Million US Dollars match!
Classical chess World Champion Vladimir Kramnik vs Deep Fritz one of the strongest chess program (if not the strongest) of the world.
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Fritzlein
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #2 on: Mar 14th, 2006, 3:07pm » |
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Go Kramnik! If he wins, I'll bet he'll get a shot at Hydra for two million.
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OLTI
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #3 on: Mar 14th, 2006, 4:30pm » |
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I'm wondering how would increase the strength of bot_bomb if it run on the same hardware of Hydra. 64 computers connected and operating as if they are a single machine, with the processing power equivalent to more than 200 standard PCs.
Here for more information about his power.
http://tournament.hydrachess.com/ahydra.php
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Fritzlein
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #4 on: Mar 14th, 2006, 5:43pm » |
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on Mar 14th, 2006, 4:30pm, OLTI wrote:| I'm wondering how would increase the strength of bot_bomb if it run on the same hardware of Hydra. |
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Yes it is a very interesting question. I expect the increase in playing strength varies directly with increase in log of computing power. So if 2 times the speed results in 50 rating points more, then 1000 times the speed results in 500 rating points more. (1000 = 2^10 and 50 * 10 = 500.)
However, not everyone expects a linear relationship to hold. Perhaps if Bomb could run a million times faster it would still fall for the elephant-horse attack, and therefore lose anyway.
We do know that Bomb performed poorly in the 2005 Postal Championship where it was thinking for hours on every move, as compared to humans thinking only 10 minutes or so. It lost games to players rated 2171, 2164, 1933, 1918, 1687, and 1556. It defeated players rated 1851, 1810, 1605, and 1471. That's a performance rating of only 1716, despite the huge thinking time.
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jdb
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #5 on: Mar 14th, 2006, 7:01pm » |
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Increased time per move, in general, helps more on games with a lower branching factor than games with a higher branching factor. With a lower branching factor, the extra time allows relatively more search depth.
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omar
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #6 on: Mar 14th, 2006, 11:09pm » |
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I just sent an email to the Hydra team to ask if they might be interested to have Hydra play Arimaa and see how it does against the humans.
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Fritzlein
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #7 on: Mar 15th, 2006, 1:06am » |
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The odds are they won't give you the time of day, but it doesn't hurt to ask. That would be so amazingly cool if the Hydra team were interested.
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PMertens
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #8 on: Mar 15th, 2006, 9:06am » |
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That would be really cool ...
After all their cute machine must be bored from beating humans in chess
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omar
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #9 on: Mar 15th, 2006, 2:45pm » |
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on Mar 15th, 2006, 1:06am, Fritzlein wrote:| The odds are they won't give you the time of day, but it doesn't hurt to ask. That would be so amazingly cool if the Hydra team were interested. |
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Yes, it never hurts to ask.
I did get a kind reply from Chrilly Donninger the lead programmer saying that Hydra is especially programmed for chess and its not trivial to change it for arimaa.
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seanick
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #10 on: Sep 28th, 2006, 9:42am » |
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its too bad- I guess the FPGA part of the program they run is too tightly coupled with chess. You would think they would be interested in trying to adapt it, after all the FPGA's are meant to optimize the same thing for chess that take the most time in Arimaa as well. that added performance, only allows them to get to P4.5 (P18 for chess, /4 for arimaa...) in approx. 1 second of evaluation.
Someone here played bot_bombP4 right? I imagine Fritzlein but don't recall the specifics. The match was called early because it took a really long time per move, and wasn't noticably better, right? Would it have been more difficult if it was the same playing strength, but at blitz speed?
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Fritzlein
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #11 on: Sep 28th, 2006, 5:06pm » |
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on Sep 28th, 2006, 9:42am, seanick wrote:| Someone here played bot_bombP4 right? I imagine Fritzlein but don't recall the specifics. The match was called early because it took a really long time per move, and wasn't noticably better, right? Would it have been more difficult if it was the same playing strength, but at blitz speed? |
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Yes, I played part of a game against BombP4. It wasn't enough moves for me to tell whether there was a difference in strength or not. BombP4 might actually be noticably stronger in tactical situations, which means that to win one would have to take advantage of Bomb's deep strategic misunderstandings.
Certainly a blitz bot becomes tougher if you can soup up its calculation speed. All of us humans are blunder-prone at blitz speed. I think beating Bomb at blitz relies in part on tactical weakness in Bomb, which would be eliminated with enough processor speed. If BombP5 (=Bomb on Hydra hardware?) could play at blitz speed, I'm not sure it could be beaten by today's humans, except by trial and error discovery of a loss the computer would repeat.
As long as I'm making s.w.a.g.s, though, I should say that I think BombP5 would still lose the Arimaa Challenge at two minutes per move, where the humans avoid most tactical blunders. I think Omar could open up the Arimaa Challenge to any type of supercomputer hardware, and humans would still be safe in the absence of software advances.
I was just noticing today in my game with chessandgo how often "slow" plans are critical in Arimaa. I had his camel hostage with my elephant and his horse hostage with my camel, both next to the same trap. I hit on the plan of herding the horse hostage over to my other home trap so his elephant wouldn't be able to defend both hostages. This was the decisive idea of the game, forcing chessandgo to let me capture a rabbit and the hostage camel for only a horse. Without that idea, I would have been losing, because I lacked total control of any trap. Yet it would have taken at least four moves to execute this plan, probably five moves to secure material advantage.
I'm trying to imagine a full-width alpha-beta searcher that can look ahead four moves on each side. Even with perfect move-ordering (which there never is), and thus optimal pruning, one would have to evaluate 15000^4 nodes, approximately 5 x 10^16. To move within an hour, it would have to search more than a quadrillion nodes per second. Any guesses on when such a computer will be available?
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99of9
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #12 on: Sep 29th, 2006, 6:59am » |
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on Sep 28th, 2006, 9:42am, seanick wrote:allows them to get to P4.5 (P18 for chess, /4 for arimaa...) in approx. 1 second of evaluation.
Someone here played bot_bombP4 right? |
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I thought the P18 for chess was using the definition of 1ply=1play for both players? If that's true, bombP4 would only be equivalent to P2.0 in chess.
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Fritzlein
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #13 on: Sep 29th, 2006, 9:11am » |
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on Sep 29th, 2006, 6:59am, 99of9 wrote:| I thought the P18 for chess was using the definition of 1ply=1play for both players? |
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I'm pretty sure the standard usage of "ply" in chess is that one play for both players is two ply. Furthermore, I would be stupefied if any computer could full-width alpha-beta search 18 moves for both players (36 ply) at all, never mind in one second.
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PMertens
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Re: The big difference between Chess and Arimaa?!
« Reply #14 on: Sep 29th, 2006, 11:06am » |
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Quote:| BombP4 might actually be noticably stronger in tactical situations, which means that to win one would have to take advantage of Bomb's deep strategic misunderstandings |
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True ... the trick is to never get involved in tactical situations.
I am quite confident that brute force without a really decent eval will not be sufficient in my lifetime.
(Meaning: a P6_Arimaa_Score is not very frigthening ... while a P20 would probably kick my butt)
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