A Computer for All Seasons
By Matt Windsor
If machines ever take over the planet, blame Robert Hyatt, Ph.D. He’s teaching them how to think. This UAB computer scientist created the legendary Cray Blitz, a two-time world computer chess champion and the first program to beat a human chess master in tournament play. His doctoral thesis helped IBM defeat Garry Kasparov in the all-time greatest man-versus-machine chess match. Now Crafty, his latest silicon contender, is challenging the world again. But this time there’s more at stake: Hyatt’s research may help uncover the building blocks of life and the secrets of weather forecasting.
Chess, like the weather—and life—is a complex game. “Horrifically complex,” suggests Hyatt. White starts the game with 20 possible moves, and Black can counter each one with 20 moves of its own. After a few turns, the variations are in the trillions. In fact, there are more possible moves on a chessboard than there are atoms in the universe.
“It’s computationally impossible to ‘solve’ the game,” Hyatt explains. Instead, chess programmers work on their machines’ basic strategy—“I prefer violent, attacking chess, and so does Crafty,” says Hyatt—then let them play to their strong suit: pure speed. The goal is to refine software and hardware until they can extract the thimbleful of useful information in this ocean of data—in seconds.
“If you could search fast enough, you could see all the way to the end of the game, and then you would win every time,” Hyatt says. “I don’t think we will ever be able to do that. But the faster you search, the better answer you can come up with.”
A grand master looking for his next move analyzes one position per second. In that same second, Crafty can tear through a few million possibilities, finding the best choice in any situation. Eventually, human players miss something, and the computer pounces. “We have a saying,” Hyatt says. “Meat makes mistakes.”
Crafty won’t even spare its creator. “I play against it regularly at home, and I have no chance,” Hyatt admits. Crafty finds its true competition on the Web, challenging all comers on the Internet Chess Server and regularly winning online tournaments. (Download a free copy of the program at www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt.)
Now that computers have beaten us at our own game, is there any point in continuing? Certainly, Hyatt insists. The same principles that a computer uses to select chess moves are helping geneticists crack the body’s chemical code and meteorologists track long-range weather patterns.
“Weather is as complex as chess,” Hyatt says. “There’s just so much data.” The National Weather Service has only recently started releasing seven-day forecasts, he notes. “They’ve been able to do that forever—but the computation for a seven-day forecast 10 years ago used to take two weeks. Now they can do it in 12 hours, and in the next 10 years, we may see forecasts up to a month ahead.”
In the meantime, Hyatt says he will keep perfecting Crafty, just as he has done for 13 years. He has occasionally produced three new versions a week, assisted by Internet-based collaborators as enthusiastic as himself. Two-time U.S. chess champion Roman Dzindzichashvili plays Crafty regularly and has been known to call up after midnight if the computer makes a questionable move. “It drives my wife crazy,” Hyatt says. But that’s only to be expected. After all, meat makes mistakes.