Humans v Houdini chess engine (Elo 3300)

Computers have been able to calculate a lot more moves than humans for a long time. The deep thought machine Kasparov beat in 1989 could calculate better than Kasparov but lost soundly because it lacked good evaluation functions. It was good in sharp tactics but lacked an understanding of the position.

The reason they are now able to beat GM is that now they have evaluation functions that allow them to "understand" chess more like humans do, plus they can calculate a lot of variations and at the same time they trim more unuseful variations than 15 years ago, so they can concentrate on the best lines. But the most important thing is the evaluation of the position, even for Houdini, and the parameters of evaluations are decided by humans according to existing theory.

Talking about humans beating machines here it is Nakamura beating Rybka in a blitza game in 2008 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1497429 .

I wouldn't want to be dogmatic about it, and you could well be right. I just assumed that the normal ELO difference relationship would hold irrespective of whether the players were humans or machines.

I thought that Gusev v Averbakh in the earlier posts was an exceptional game but that is pretty ordinary in comparison with this. It's not often that a 3-minute game lasts 271 moves and has the ending BBBBBK v K.

I kid you not.

When a GM actually beats a chess engine, it's usually because of some "stupid" programming glich (that quickly gets fixed later).  Not very satisfying, or edifying.

So what did that 4 year old game (cited above) actually demonstrate?  Except perhaps that Nakamura was "deathly afraid" of opening up the position, and Rybka foolishly gave up a draw in a "stupid" attempt to win.

Rybka had an easy draw in a closed position, and was up two rooks versus two minor pieces.  But it somehow didn't know to just sit and wait, or claim a draw by repetition.

Was this some "Great Lesson Learned" between Man and Machine?  Hardly.

It was a fairly mindless game along the e-file, with endless repetition, and a fairly clear draw, until Rybka decided to give back material. 

The irony is that so many of these Chess.com threads are chockablock with "experts and coaches" endlessly intoning that we should all play "mainline (big theory) openings" like the Ruy Lopez or Sicilian to improve our overall play.

But when it comes to GM's playing against engines, all that grand advice is quickly abandoned, because (as we all know), it's "death by a thousand cuts" when playing against the newer engines.

Does it really matter what time control we are talking about?  Probably not.  The 3300 rated engine will win, regardless.

Humans used to run foot races against early automobiles, when the result was still in question.  Those days are long gone, indeed.

Ditto with the newer chess engines of today.  Get over it.

Thats about the craziest thing I have ever seen on 64 squares.

That game demonstrates an enormous engine weakness. Rybka is up material, so it thinks it's winning. Take away the fifty move rule and it would still think it's winning 1000 moves later. With the fifty move rule in place, the program felt compelled to push it's material advantage and made blunders, just to avoid the draw.

By the way, it's true: computer ratings are not the equivalent of human ratings. Because, as said, computers only play computers. So I wouldn't be sure that some computers actually have a full 500 elo over a world champion. Nevertheless, players of any level will have a really hard time with them -- modern computers are nearly impossible to beat for humans.

It's just the horizon effect...

That game doesn't demonstrate nothing but nonetheless it's pretty impressive. It's not like the human wins playing an odd opening, he wins by going in a certain position in wich he knows the engin will blunder.

BTW I never heard a master saying to play only big theory openings, they always say to play openings you know well (not too much theory but not dubious never used openings) expecially if you are playing with better competition.

I'm suprised how well my blackberry plays chess on just level 6/8!

There isn't "computer elo" and "human elo". Computers are just at the high end of the Elo ratings because they're so strong. Their ratings are probably a bit skewed because they only play other computers though. It is almost a new rating system sitting on top of the "human Elo", but it's still the same system.

I guess so. What's wrong with it?

Yeah, I've just looked into it a bit more (than not at all). I was way off. Apologies.

I'm sorry if my english isn't good enough to explain it my i'll give it a shot:

The Elo system is based on confrontation between members in a given group. If you have 2 separated groups you will have 2 different Elo systems.

If computers never play with humans they can't be assigned a FIDE rating, they have a rating on their own.

If I start a new federation tomorrow morning just with me and other guys who never played chess and I use an Elo system to calculate ratings i will soon have an incredible Elo rating but that won't make me a stronger player.

BTW I believe computers should have much higher ratings if they played more with humans

While this is a commonly seen assertion, this paper disagrees with it: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/ReHa11c.pdf.

 That paper confirms what I suspect (and not just about chess, but about most competitive occupations), a tendency for the avergae skill level to get better over time. I think due to things like learning from past masters (standing on the shoulders of giants) a larger player (population) pool to draw talent from, better training methods (computers for example, Lasker did not have access to CT-ART!).

My guess is any of the top 5-10 players today, if they could step into a time machine, would become world champion in any year prior to like 1980 or so.

My guess is any of the top 5-10 players today, if they could step into a time machine, would become world champion in any year prior to like 1980 or so.

Especially if they could bring their laptop with them !

 I think if I could bring my iPhone into the time machine, I could be world champ too. I even have my explanation ready:

Em. Lasker : "Hey...whats that your looking at during our game???"

InvisbleDuck: "Nothing."

I think this would work.

That's interesting! The investigators in this paper analysed 1000s of master games with a super-engine (Rybka) and recorded how often players made the same move as the super-engine's recommendation. They found that the stronger the player, the more often their moves matched the super-engine's moves.

Their data shows that as a players strength increases, the probability that they will play the same move as a super-engine gets closer to 1. Therefore they assumed that the super-engine's moves were almost always the best available.

if i played a correspondence game against houdini useing houdini to analyze, of course i would win .so correspondence chess doesnt really count when it comes to gaugeing an engines strength because the poor engine doesnt  have any entity to help it.the top engines have good positional understanding but not as good as a gm of course but the fact is ,unless you play correspondance against the engine without the aid of another engine its pointless to to easily dismiss the awesome playing of engines like houdini. id love to see a match with the top dog with out the aid of a computer! Play houdini with full 6 man tables uesing a duel socket hex core  like the computer in this utube vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLBhvzeE_TE&feature=plcp&context=C37a91f4UDOEgsToPDskKGsD7Gd8NOY7ZwBmh7Ojil

now that would be a match! id put my money on houdini

 Yes, but this also is OTB and not correspondence.

We dont have a correspondence test available ( that I know of) of a super GM playing Houdini at a time control of 3 days/move.