YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?

58 points markusw 4 hours ago 17 comments

glimshe 35 minutes ago | parent

Very interesting. I don't play chess but like to observe others playing and talking about it on YouTube.

I thought about something the other day... Modern chess sites run proprietary algorithms to detect cheating by modern engines. But would it be possible for an old engine, let's say from the 70s or 80s, running on modern hardware to deceive these algorithms?

They wouldn't win every tournament but still have a respectable performance.

emil-lp 33 minutes ago | parent

My guess is that they would be even easier to detect.

jacquesm 32 minutes ago | parent

Sargon II is available:

https://c64online.com/c64-games/sargon-ii-de/

qsort 17 minutes ago | parent

From what I gather cheat detection uses a combination of factors to determine how "human-like" an account is: time usage, webpage interactions, move quality under time pressure and so on. I think you could probably try to deliberately deceive a specific website's cheat detection with software that tries to emulate how humans play, at which point you'd be in the classic attack vs. defense arms race.

Also notice that for events like Title Tuesday you must play on a dedicated client with at least 2 cameras, so it would be significantly harder to pull it off.

emil-lp 35 minutes ago | parent

This is very cool. But yes, totally unsurprising that a megahertz machine with 100MB+ available ram has >2500 ELO.

gattilorenz 27 minutes ago | parent

Except it has 64MB of RAM... Anyway, in the early 2000s machines were already doing better than DeepBlue, so it didn't last long

emil-lp 18 minutes ago | parent

Okay, but probably also a turbo button, which is tantamount to cheating.

skew-aberration 24 minutes ago | parent

I grew up with these machines around, and as a kid they seemed to so much more powerful than humans. It's kinda weird to think that I became 'smarter' than them eventually. I suspect they will be able to run superhuman AI one day too.

bentt 30 minutes ago | parent

Wonderful work! Just inspiring.

I had a Pentium Pro 200 back in the day, to run 3DSMax 1.0 on Windows NT 3.5.

bell-cot 22 minutes ago | parent

In one sense, Knuth fans and really good engineers are correct to prioritize algorithms.

Unfortunately, most humans see big|new|expensive hardware as great status signifiers, barriers to lesser folks joining the Cool Club, and optimal sources of sales commissions.

FartyMcFarter 18 minutes ago | parent

> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.

I don't buy this. I've seen GMs playing online while verbalizing their thought process (on twitch / youtube videos where they livestream their play), and they consider way more branches than I do, while also going deeper than I ever would on some branches. My top rating in lichess blitz is about 1900, not bad but way lower than a GM.

moron4hire 14 minutes ago | parent

It makes sense. The space of moves is a tree. If you're doing a breadth-first search and a grandmaster is doing a more depth-oriented search with heuristics for pruning low value branches, then the same total number of moves could be considered, but the grandmaster is reaching the better moves before you.

tarsierscripter 5 minutes ago | parent

No, a grandmaster can also consider moves way faster than an amateur. Watch Hikaru Nakamura solve chess puzzles [1]. He has already solved the puzzle and moved on to the next one before an amateur can even see the pieces on the board.

[1] https://youtu.be/4EfSymvT59M

vhcr 16 minutes ago | parent

> As it turns out, the majority of the Elo gains (+720 of the +1335 gained) can be attributed to better programming, and not better hardware.

It's not so easy, a lot of that better programming can be attributed to better hardware, it wouldn't have been possible to implement NNUE or Fishtest without modern hardware.

bjourne 16 minutes ago | parent

Why is the time per move fixed? A chess engine can, of course, do much better by deciding itself how much time to allot to each move.

cousin_it 9 minutes ago | parent

I'll go out on a limb and say that future AI models, running on today's smartphones, will be better at programming and formal math than today's frontier models running in datacenters. And by "future" I mean less than 5 years from now.