Will computers become conscious? (NEW CONCEPTS)

[nemesis8]

Ok where were we?
We are in an apartment, Mum's out, and Bobby is determined to play.The children take out the rules and start setting up the pieces. They carefully ensure that the board has a white square in the right corner. It is believed that the chequered board was developed in about 1200 AD....it helps the players with something we will later call 'pattern recognition' or 'chunking'

[nemesis8]

We are hearing the children learn the names of these beautiful wooden pieces. King Queen, Rook, Bishop Knight and Pawn....'We don't know but can guess that this was most likely a Staunton set, the design that was patented in 1849 by Howard Staunton the British player who was both a leading player and organiser of a great chess tournament in London. This is the most common design of set, used all round the world for tournament play.' Nowadays when somebody asks to visualise a wooden chess piece we 'see' the image of a 'Staunton' piece.

These kids are learning the sights and language of chess. For us this is routine but for Bobby this is exhilarating.....

[nemesis8]

Whilst Joan and Bobby are having fun mastering the basics......

Claude Shannon (1916-2001), a research worker at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, is presenting a serious research paper "Programming a Digital Computer for Playing Chess". (March 9th 1949) at the National Institute for Radio Engineers Convention in New York.......

[nemesis8]

Mikhail Botvinnik is the chess hero of the Soviet Union. He has just won the 1948 World Chess Championship. The soviets would hold the title until a certain Bobby Fischer took "their" crown.

Botvinnik was also involved in developing some of the first Soviet chess computers his work was based on the principle of "selective searching"......

[berniegreen]

[nemesis8]

[berniegreen]

I don't wish to be rude, Nemesis, but my response to your last is:

Don't know. Don't care. Can we move on?

[nemesis8]

No offence taken.

I am happy to leave "Why the vicar drowned" as I know the answer......

I guess the problems will arise when somebody poses a question and even Chad doesn't know the answer.

So thanks for your contribution so far... you have already identified some areas that we will attempt to cover in the future.

[nemesis8]

So we are still in 1949.... Bobby has bullied his mum to buy him a chess set and he and Joan have learned the rules, how to identify the pieces, how they move and capture, and where they are placed on the board.

Bobby even knows that a game finishes with a Checkmate.

Bobby is still unaware that there are roughly 318,979,654,000 ways of playing the first four moves but he senses that chess is indeed the most difficult game in the world....

He and Joan need help.

They turn back to the sheet of instructions and they find a handy list of values for each piece.

Queen=9
Rook=5
Bishop=3
Knight=3
Pawn=1

What Bobby doesn't know is that if he had bought a Russian chess set the instructions would probably say

Queen = 10

[nemesis8]

It was perhaps wise of Howard Staunton, the inventor of the pieces not to have patented his own instructions and list of numerical values for the pieces (as published in Stauntons Handbook) as poor Bobby and Joan would have had to learn that...

Queen=9.94
Rook=5.48
Bishop=3.50
Knight =3.05
Pawn=1

[nemesis8]

Nemesis is a tad disappointed that he is getting far less feedback than Mick's posting on the size of a black man's willy on THOBR thread.

[nemesis8]

You might be interested that the medieval Arabs playing "Shantranji" also had their charts to help them play.

The Arabs took the reverse approach rather than the pawn being the common denominator they based theirs on the rook the most powerful piece.

Let's translate their figures into ours and look at how a typical "shantranji" chart might read:

Rook Pawn = 1
Knight pawn=1.5
Centre pawn=2
Bishop =2
Queen=3
Knight=5.33
Rook =8

Ok, try to figure out why the big difference?

[nemesis8]

Of course you could just Google the answer....

But then you might just have to admit .....that your computer, is in some way, smarter than you are.....you have some how become "over dependent" on your silicon friend.....he/she is now solving problems that you once would have had to solve yourself....

[nemesis8]

Ok before we recap and move on.

Let us for the first time try to be a bit more scientific about this.
We are going to try and work out value of a chess piece by measuring each piece's mobility by the number of squares that it attacks across a random selection of games. This was tried out by Greig Bell....

Here is what he found....
Moves........6-25..... 26-45...46-65
Queen........6.6........7.0.........9.6
Rook..........2.6.........4.3........5.1
Bishop.......3.1.........3.5........3.8
Knight.......3.3.........3.3........3.3


If you look closely at the table it telling you something. Namely that the Queen and the Bishops mobility increases towards the end of the game. Whilst the Rooks activity increases dramatically after the opening. The Knights activity however remains constant throughout the game.

[nemesis8]

March 9, 1949, Claude Shannon (1916-2001), a research worker at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, presented a paper called "Programming a Digital Computer for Playing Chess."

Let us imagine we are in the audience


"Most of the maxims and principles of correct play are really assertions about evaluating positions, for example: -

(1)The relative values of queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn are about 9, 5, 3, 3,1, respectively. Thus other things being equal (!) if we add the numbers of pieces for the two sides with these coefficients, the side with the largest total has the better position.

(nem edits)

These and similar principles are only generalizations from empirical evidence of numerous evidence of numerous games, and only have a kind of statistical validity. Probably any chess principle can be contradicted by particular counter examples.

However, form these principles one can construct a crude evaluation function"