When will the chess programmers write an engine that plans ?

[zullil]

I mean that creates a plan and develops a main line that leads to something.

What you need to consider first is the question: WHY, do humans need a plan?

Answer, because their inability to flawlessly look ahead for 100 moves. If humans were able they would need no plan, not even chess knowledge and they would play for 99.99999% the best move.

Not the usual engines we have today. That play chess within a Horizont of search depth.

Because chess essentially is a search game.

And now I have spoiled your thread

I don’t think so Ed.


I do think of we would have algorithms that create planning, this would also help the normal tree search based chess engines.
Because any chess programs comes in the situation that the tree search comes to an end.

Maybe we have to create or found a new subgroup.

Where Engines exist that do no tree search but only analysing of the position and creating a main line that was not founded the usual way.

Some say that the humans have to play this way because they lack hardware power in the brain.
So the programmers like to stay in the old paradigms. And continue stupid programs as they did in the last 50 years.

Ok. I can live with this.
But it is not what I am interested in.

I am interested in the idea to solve the problem without this huge search tree.

I am NOT interested to see what a chess engine CAN DO if it computes millions of positions. That is boring.

I want to see if it can analyse the position and come with a senseful idea or plan because it knows about chess.

We had human beings on the moon. But no chess engine that can play chess.
Ok we have Stockfish or komodo or others who play chess by going deep in the search tree. But when my blind grandma who can only play
Bingo gets hundred keys and tries them out, one of them will maybe open the door of the garage. That’s not understanding chess,
That’s using hardware progress to open the door.

The results of AI in computerchess are minimal.
The progress is minimal.

One could summarise it that chess engines have no idea what chess is and what the goal of chess is.

But they know how to reach 40 plies in 3 seconds.

Look I searched for this goal a long long time,
When you appeared in cologne Ed together with Jan and the hair dryer on stage , I was there.
I was there when thomas nitsche held his speech about computerchess progress in intelligent search strategy in 1986 .
Ossi and richard had a very weak mephisto cologne.
Levy tried with a motorola 68K Hardware in cologne. I think even mike johnson was there in cologne with motorola 68K Hardware at that Time.


At this time I still had hope and thought: yes there will be one day we will have intelligent chess engines.


But today I am watching the “progress” and I get the feeling that the development ends.

[d]rk6/p1r3p1/P3B1Kp/1p2B3/8/8/8/8 w - - 0 1

How about a program that, given this position, says "That's a clever one, Frank. The white-square bishop needs to block the rook, so the king can walk to d8."

I should add that it is painful watching Stockfish solve this mate-in-5.

[jp]

I am interested in the idea to solve the problem without this huge search tree.

I am NOT interested to see what a chess engine CAN DO if it computes millions of positions. That is boring.

I want to see if it can analyse the position and come with a senseful idea or plan because it knows about chess.

rk6/p1r3p1/P3B1Kp/1p2B3/8/8/8/8 w - - 0 1
How about a program that, given this position, says "That's a clever one, Frank. The white-square bishop needs to block the rook, so the king can walk to d8."

I should add that it is painful watching Stockfish solve this mate-in-5.

There's a way to try to get what mclane wants. Get someone to sponsor a prize for it.
e.g. a prize for a program that can achieve a set performance level with minimal computation and minimal memory.
Or to "understand" positions like above, where they're not told beforehand the set of test positions.

[mclane]

When I had to play Bronstein with Chess System Tal in the Hague, he considered 30" on the first move.

Then he played his opening line, sacced a pawn and killed tal.

I asked him what he considered so much on the first move. He said he had to crawl through his memory to find the fitting sac for CSTal to eat that looks harmless enough the computer would eat it without understanding. This took 30 minutes.

[mclane]

http://www.thorstenczub.de/bronstein.gif

[pgn][Event "AEGON Chess Tournament"]
[Site "The Hague NED"]
[Date "1997.04.22"]
[Round "5"]
[White "David Bronstein"]
[Black "CHESS SYSTEM TAL"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteTitle "GM"]
[WhiteElo "2435"]
[WhiteCountry "RUS"]

1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 g6 3. c4 Bg7 4. Nc3 d5 5. Qb3 dxc4 6. Qxc4 O-O 7. e4 Na6 8.
Be2 c5 9. d5 e6 10. O-O exd5 11. exd5 Bf5 12. a3 Re8 13. Bf4 Ne4 14. Nb5
Bxb2 15. Rab1 Qf6 16. Be3 Red8 17. g4 Bxg4 18. Qxe4 Bf5 19. Qc4 Bxb1 20.
Rxb1 Rd7 21. d6 Re8 22. Qd5 Be5 23. Nxe5 Qxe5 24. Rd1 Qxd5 25. Rxd5 Re6 26.
Kf1 f6 27. h4 Kf8 28. Bg4 f5 29. Bf3 Kg8 30. Bf4 Re8 31. Nc7 Rc8 32. Nxa6
bxa6 33. Rd1 Kg7 34. Be5+ Kf8 35. Bd5 Rcd8 36. Be6 Ke8 37. h5 Re7 38. d7+
Rdxd7 39. Bxd7+ Rxd7 40. Re1 gxh5 41. Bd6+ Kf7 42. Bxc5 Kf6 43. Kg2 h6 44.
Kg3 Rd5 45. Bxa7 Ra5 46. Bd4+ Kf7 47. Bb2 Rc5 48. Be5 Rc2 49. f3 Rc4 50. f4 1-0[/pgn]

[zullil]

When I had to play Bronstein with Chess System Tal in the Hague, he considered 30" on the first move.

Then he played his opening line, sacced a pawn and killed tal.

I asked him what he considered so much on the first move. He said he had to crawl through his memory to find the fitting sac for CSTal to eat that looks harmless enough the computer would eat it without understanding. This took 30 minutes.

I would be very interested in seeing the development of program that approached chess in a "human way", by "making plans" that it could "explain" in ways that humans would understand. That would be a significant development in "artificial intelligence".

But, like even the best human players, it would be crushed by a modern alpha/beta or neural net engine.

So if the goal is winning chess games, forget about "making plans" and "understanding".

[Ras]

Over the board, the only thing that counts is the moves in a game. Given that engines play massively better than humans, it's not engines that fail to understand chess, it's humans. The human way of understanding of chess has become outclassed. Human planning is just a workaround for human lack of calculation, and a comparatively weak workaround at that.

[PK]

"Planning" engine would play boring, schematic, uninspired chess. How do I know? Because such a sad thing has been done to beautiful game of go, see https://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/

[MonteCarlo]

To be honest all that has changed from the origins of chess until today is the hardware.

So, no software improvements at all? On equal hardware, I should expect Fritz 10 to hold its own with SF 11, or, sticking with the same engine across time, SF 5 to hold its own with SF 11?

It's almost as if this claim is not only testable, but already tested somewhere...maybe someone could construct a list that compares the strength of engines?

In all seriousness, the claim as it stands is clearly wrong. SF 11 could give big time odds on the same hardware to an old top engine and still win comfortably; not only has progress not been confined to hardware, the software improvements are huge.

I can only guess that maybe you meant something else and this was a bit of hyperbole?

[mclane]

There was progress. But in the wrong direction.

[JohnW]

What would be the point even if someone created one that plans like a human? If it's a good plan wouldn't the plan come to the same conclusion as an engine playing tactically? Like I just read in an old computer chess book about the chess computer "Belle", when it comes right down to it, chess is all tactical, except that humans can't process all the millions of moves in a given position. So the human play instinctively while the chess computer is actually seeing the moves and the reason for the humans instinctive move (assuming his instincts are correct).