Weird Math by David Darling

Author:David Darling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

CAN CHESS BE SOLVED?

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

—GARRY KASPAROV

Imagine an incredibly powerful computer that could always figure out the best move in any given possible chess position. “Best move” means the one that leads most quickly to winning or, at the very least, not losing—in other words, the optimal outcome for the player. Now, suppose that this computer played against another that was identical to it in every respect. Which computer would win, or would it always be a draw? We’ve solved so many monumental problems in math, you would think an old game like chess, with easy-to-learn rules, would hold no challenges to theoreticians armed with the latest computing technology. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The first chess-playing machine, known as the Turk, was actually a fake—although it managed to fool a lot of people between when it was first unveiled by its Hungarian inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, in 1770 and its destruction by fire in 1854. Among those who saw it in action were Napoléon Bonaparte (no mean mathematician himself), Benjamin Franklin, and one of the pioneers of modern computation, Charles Babbage. Behind a large wooden cabinet were the head and upper body of a life-size mannequin dressed in impressive Ottoman robes and a turban. Three doors at the front of the cabinet could be opened to reveal an intricate mechanism and other components, while three doors at the back could also be opened, one at a time, to let spectators see through to the other side. What they didn’t see, however, was the expert human chess player who sat on a seat that could be slid from one side of the cabinet to the other as the doors were successively opened and closed. The concealed occupant determined the moves made in reply to whoever was challenging the machine and then operated the Turk’s arm and hand to move chess pieces on a board visible to the audience via linkages connected to a pegboard chessboard inside the cabinet. Ingenious and exquisitely made though von Kempelen’s automaton was, it relied wholly on human brainpower to overcome its opponents.

No mechanical wizardry—no symphony of cogs and gears, levers and linkages—could work fast enough to play even a modest game of chess, such is the complexity of the game. Hopes for a true chess-playing machine had to await the development of the electronic computer after World War II. Pioneers of computation, such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon, were interested in chess as a means of testing out early ideas in artificial intelligence. In a seminal paper on the subject, in 1950, Shannon wrote, “Although of no practical importance, the question is of theoretical interest, and it is hoped that… this problem will act as a wedge in attacking other problems—of greater significance.” A couple of years later, Dietrich Prinz, a colleague of Turing’s, ran the first chess-playing program on the new Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester University.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.