Chess algorithm written by Alan Turing goes up against Kasparov Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has played one of the first computer chess programs ever created, written over 60 years ago by Alan Turing. Credit: VideoLectures.net As part of the University of Manchester's Alan Turing Centenary Conference, Kasparov took on Turochamp, an algorithm that Turing wrote by hand, but never had …
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> Is there any scan of the algorithm? It'd be interesting to see.
It's in "The Essential Turing" by Jack Copeland, pages 567 to 575, which says:
"Turing's essay 'Chess' was originally published in the 1953 collection Faster Than Thought, where it formed a section of a chapter entitled 'Digital Computers Applied To Games'. (Edited by Vivian Bowden.)
The typescript is among the Turing Papers in the Modern Archive Centre, King's College, Cambridge (cataogue reference B 7)."
A lot of his stuff is online at alanturing.net, but apparently not this paper.
Take a look at The Turing Archive. I've not carefully checked the linked pages to see if they actually have the algorithm, but they certainly contain related notes.
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Turing didn't invent AI nor is the Father of it. He was a Genius an one of the founders of Modern Computing.
The "Turing test" wasn't a rigorous proof, just an idea that has been shown to be flawed. Nothing really to do with AI. Really it's just a conversation piece and not one of his real bits of work, mathematics or research.
Turing obviously proved that a Chess program didn't need AI either (as was thought at one stage).
So far NO-ONE has invented AI, partly because we can't even agree exactly what "real" Intelligence is or how or measure it (IQ tests don't).
Give me a spec for Intelligence rather than a vague goal (Playing Go, Chess or simulating the Archers, or convincing conversation) and I'll design the algorithms and write a program. If the computer "isn't powerful enough" or "hasn't enough database" (two oft excuses) then it will be a slow poorly educated socially inept un-British artificial Intelligence. It will be intelligent and artificial.
SImple problem of descriptors. What most laypeople think AI refers to is probably better described as "Artificial Sentience." Since we're not sure what sentience is in the first place, that complicates things.
Of course, what most people actually think when they see AI is "god that was an awful movie."
"So far NO-ONE has invented AI"
I thought Obama bin Liner invented Al Qaeda
We move on. Here is a comparison between a bloke who croaked sometime ago*. Against a really trained, honed mind at a game that was invented thousands of years previous. Kasparov would surely have had more training at this than Turing, plus didn't have to bother about solving such trivia as Enigma.
*Wasn't Turing's fate to meet an Apple?
Oh, OK. Gorrit.
From the Register article: "He wrote algorithms without having a computer – many young scientists would never believe that was possible. It was an outstanding accomplishment."
Was that one a 'canned statement' too? I'd love to know who drafted it.
Algorithms have been around for a long time. Euclid, around 300BC wrote a rather good one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_algorithm The very term came from the name of al-Khwārizmī, the Persian mathematician born circa 800 AD.
The Royal Navy had trigonometric tables computed by hand (using similar algorithms to those now used in computers) for navigational purposes; they were very interested in automating that work through the Difference Engine of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) who started work on it 1822. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm was actually first used by Gauss, in 1805, to reduce his manual effort in his calculations concerning astronomy.
The minimax algorithm from game theory was (so I have quickly checked) first proved by John von Neumann in 1928: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax#cite_note-1 Doubtless Turing would have known of this algorithm.
Of course, Turing would have been better using the minimax algorithm (with its arbitrary depth look-ahead). There is nothing wonderful or disappointing that Turing drafted a program with 2-step look-head. What is disappointing is that someone who should know better thought to claim it was wonderfully original.
Turing was a great scientist/mathematician. If this sort of stuff continues, the 100th anniversary of his birth will not do him justice.
[Aside: I have interviewed for jobs (soon-to-be) computer science graduates who could not even explain a single viable argument passing mechanism of a non-recursive programming language. And that was in the late 1970s and early 1980s; I don't expect things to be better now. And certainly not if their teachers allow them to believe computers predated algorithms, in practical use.]
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