What in the name of god is bible study?

[Jaguar]

Lul Thyme

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme
If you really meant that chess was not far behind in terms of understanding how to solve it, then the fact that checkers has been "solved" recently (or at all) is irrelevant. In terms of understanding, both these games were solved in the 50s at least.

We pretty much knew how to do it, all that was needed was computational horsepower to do it, which was really just a matter of time.

In fact, if this understanding is really what you meant, then it goes against what you were trying to argue about with Ben, since understanding the problem and the problem being finite doesn't make it solvable in practice, which is roughly what Ben was saying.

For your original sentence to be an argument, you need to be arguing that chess is in fact nearly solved IN PRACTICE, a claim which you seem to backing from in the second quote.

He means that the algorithms and techniques that will be necessary to solve it in practice have only recently been developed or are about to be developed/refined.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Kidicious
In fairness, Boris hasn't been involved lately.

It's true, I'd rather leave Ben out of any pile-ons I'm involved in.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme

I was referring to comments such as the following:






While I agree that Ben's estimates using Moore's law are naively pessimistic, his estimates based on the number of different positions are naively optimistic. I believe the complexity of the problem grows much faster than linearly with the number of positions.

Of course, any predictions of this kind are going to be at least somewhat wild, but if you look, for example, at the time it took to go from 5 to 6 to 7 pieces endgame analysis in chess, and think about the problem a bit, it seems hard to imagine this increase being much faster than linear, if even that.

6-pieces were done in 2006 and 7-pieces is on its way for sometimes in 2015 according to
(http://www.gilith.com/research/papers/chess.pdf)





But then this isn't really saying much at all. Even for checkers, relatively few deep new ideas were involved. It was mostly a matter of computing power. You can make the same claim about go.

I do not understand why you are contesting my claim about progress made in solving chess related to computer science. There's been a paradigm shift with distributed computing that Chess is taking advantage of. Relatively recent advancements in technology is accelerating the rate of progress towards solving Chess by non-trivial amounts.

This is both very impressive and not that much. Even these "unexpected" supra-technologies have come in at a somewhat regular pace in the past and can be expected to do so in the future.

I disagreee -- the growth we've seen in scientific computing since ~2000 has been unprecedented no matter how you look at it (excluding the invention of the first computer).

I think the type of improvements you mention are somewhat expected (not individually, but in the sense that some improvements of this kind will crop up) by researchers in the field and are (roughly) taken into account in predictions.

I disagree, because it's not a field most researches in solving Chess follow too closely. They talk about what they know and are familiar with, I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to find a Chess researcher who can explain how to leverage Cell or Larrabee to accelerate computations.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme
Asher :

I find the two following comments slightly at odds, especially in the context of your argument with Ben.

If you really meant that chess was not far behind in terms of understanding how to solve it, then the fact that checkers has been "solved" recently (or at all) is irrelevant. In terms of understanding, both these games were solved in the 50s at least.

You are ignoring the key part of that statement -- it involved computer science. It was not until recently that we knew how to reliably apply algorithms to implement the solution to the problem, and was not until recently that we had the technology to do it.

I fear you're lost in theoretical academia with your mindset. I don't particularly care if someone discovered in theory how to solve a problem in the 1950s if they had no way to do it. Finding the practical solution to a theoretical problem is the realm of computer science -- we're the bridge between the bat**** crazy theorists and the real world. That's why I explicitly mentioned computer science in my comments, not just game theory.

In fact, if this understanding is really what you meant, then it goes against what you were trying to argue about with Ben, since understanding the problem and the problem being finite doesn't make it solvable in practice, which is roughly what Ben was saying.

But this is not true. You are overcomplicating what is really a simple concept: we know how to solve Chess, we have implemented the technologies to do it. We cannot say the same thing about the Bible -- we don't know how to "solve" the Bible and we don't have any techniques to do it. Theology is a messy and inconsistent field, and even that is outside of the scope of casual "bible study" Ben talks about.

It was a terrible analogy any way you look at it.

[Ben Kenobi]

In fact, if this understanding is really what you meant, then it goes against what you were trying to argue about with Ben, since understanding the problem and the problem being finite doesn't make it solvable in practice, which is roughly what Ben was saying.

That's exactly it. Just because a problem is finite, doesn't mean that it is solvable.

There are even things that are both finite and unbounded, but we'll leave those aside.

[Ben Kenobi]

I believe the complexity of the problem grows much faster than linearly with the number of positions.

10^150 is a massive number, and takes those into account. You can do the maths yourself, but if you take the total number of possible positions that's about what you get, not including those positions which are illegal or impossible or the same position repeated over again in different configurations, etc.

The real number of unique positions will be less then this, but still a very large number.

[Ben Kenobi]

We cannot say the same thing about the Bible -- we don't know how to "solve" the Bible and we don't have any techniques to do it. Theology is a messy and inconsistent field, and even that is outside of the scope of casual "bible study" Ben talks about

Asher.

[Ben Kenobi]

So what you are saying is that the Bible, like Chess, is a completely solvable problem?

Just to be clear.

Nope, I'm saying what you say here that we cannot 'solve' the bible in the same way that chess can be solved, which gets back into my point about the bible being unbounded, yet finite.

[Ben Kenobi]

Quantum computing is not a chip size.

Fine. Subatomic size chips.

[Darius871]

Not Asher v. Ben again...

[onodera]

Bible is bounded, Ben. My granma's has a front cover and a back cover.

[onodera]

Bible is bounded, Ben. My granma's has a front cover and a back cover.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi




Fine. Subatomic size chips.

I wasn't being pedantic Ben.
Making chips smaller, even "subatomic size" has nothing to do with what people mean by "quantum computing".

[Elok]

? I know it's a radically different technology not comparable to standard chips, but quantum computing does involve using the quantum state (whateverTF that is; I'm no physicist) of a single atom to perform calculations in base-18 or something instead of binary, right? My understanding of it is that, in a glib and overly-simplistic way, Ben is sort of right; the "chip" in question would be very small and immensely powerful, albeit quite dissimilar from computers like we have now.

But of course I'm not an expert. I only know about it from a Michael Crichton book, and he often mangles facts...case in point, The Terminal Man.

EDIT: Checked Wiki, couldn't decipher their entry. Got a headache trying. I'm going to assume Crichton got it wrong and I've been quoting nonsense until told otherwise, since this sounds way too complex to be boiled down in his usual fashion.