Machine domination in graphs When chess machines passed human performance, how fast did it happen? Here is a plot of the Elo ratings of chess systems from the Swedish Chess Computer Association tournaments: Of course, the data is noisy - I don't really think chess software has become worse over the last few years. In this case it might just have been a narrowing of the field. Plotting them as a function of clock speed produces the following intriguing graph, showing some jumps in software performance on the same hardware: Combining the first graph with List of FIDE chess world number ones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia we get the following relative graph:

It shows nicely how humans have not been getting much better, while the machines improve from nearly hopeless to superhuman. Of course, this is slightly iffy: while SSDF has tried to calibrate against humans one can always question the commensurably. One can also calculate the probability of winning against players of different ranks (again assuming commensurability): Looking at 6 game matches the probability of winning the majority looks like this, a bit sharper: Human amateurs were already having trouble at the start, but grandmasters could be confident at the start of the 90s... and were outclassed by the end. Observant readers might wonder why Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997. The reason is that this tournament data uses consumer machines, not the supercomputer IBM pitted against him. For 1997 the winner in the tournament was HIARCS 6.0, running on a 49 MB P200 MMX. Deep blue was a 30 node system with a 120 MHz processor per node, plus 480 special purpose chess chips. It ran at 11.38 GFLOPS on numerics. A pentium MMX at 200 MHz is around 23.53 MFLOPS. So Deep Blue was at least 484 times more powerful (and likely quite a bit more, thanks to the special chess chips and parallelism). So the mystery of why it won so early is solved: the brute force allowed IBM to get extra performance equivalent to perhaps a decade development. Comments (0) Posted by Anders3 at 05:45 PM

Is the future green dwarves? Seems that Slashdot has noticed the paper Human Engineering and Climate Change by Matthew Liao, me and Rebecca Roache. There is an interview with Matthew in The Atlantic The fun part is that Slashdot tagged it 'troll'. Which I personally find accurate: when I contributed, I felt I was partially trolling. The basic argument is that climate change and many other environmental problems have upstream and downstream solutions. For example, 1) human consumption leads to 2) a demand for production and energy, which leads to 3) industry, which leads to 4) greenhouse gas emissions, which lead to 5) planetary heating, which leads to 6) bad consequences. One solution might be to try to make less emissive industry (fix the 3-4 link). Another might be to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (reduce 4), geoengineering that cools the planet (reduce 5) or adapt to a changed world (handle 6). The latter are downstream solutions. When geoengineering is suggested many people think it is better to use an upstream solution for a variety of reasons (controllability, scepticism of technological fixes etc). Consuming less would be really upstream (ignoring the practical problems of actually doing it to the extent necessary, which are pretty major, and the countervailing aspects of human psychology). But if it is better to have upstream solutions, why not go for cause 0, human desires for various things? If people do not want meat, plenty of grassland could be reforested and emissions reduced. If people want to have fewer children, resources become less scarce and so on. If people are smaller, they need less resources. So we argue that it might be a good idea to look at reengineering humans to be green. Obviously we can change ourselves through culture and rational convincing... to some extent. But it is tough to change lifestyle this way. So might there be tricks to modify ourselves in order to better behave in ways we want to want. Biological means to make our second order desires dominate first order desires. The methods we mention are mostly examples and likely *far* too wussy to amount to much. But there might be better methods if we were to investigate them properly. Of course, in the long run I think the real sustainable choice is to become postbiological. But that is a bit further away. This is also why I doubt genetic engineering is going to be that effective: it takes so long time, parents will be very cautious about it, and the things that can be done ethically are fairly limited. To some degree I think our paper is green design fiction of the kind I criticised earlier. But I suspect that the ethical irritant effect of bioengineering humans might be enough to trigger some thinking about to what lengths we actually do want to go about fixing the environment. Sometimes downstream solutions might be more ethical and humane. But we should not imagine that our biological nature is exempt from being part of a potential solution.

Comments (0) Posted by Anders3 at 02:51 AM