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12+ Works 246 Membros 3 Críticas 1 Favorited

About the Author

Matthew Sadler is a Grandmaster and a former British Champion. With co-author Natasha Regan, Sadler won the prestigious English Chess Federation Book of the Year Award for their worldwide bestseller Game Changer: AlphaZero's Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI.
Image credit: Matthew Sadler

Obras por Matthew Sadler

Associated Works

Alistair in Outer Space (1984) — Contribuidor — 225 exemplares
Alistair Underwater (1990) — Contribuidor, algumas edições76 exemplares
Alistair's Time Machine (1986) — Contribuidor, algumas edições53 exemplares

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Conhecimento Comum

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Críticas

Anthropomorphizing AI is an obstacle to understanding it and what it does and will do. What AI of the DeepMind kind already does is having thousands of bots playing each other in complex optimization tasks - this is entirely genderless - only possible if you know what the goal is and can measure (degrees of) success according to existing rules. This is the crux and the power. It will be machines effectively learning from and programming each other. The constraints that evolution has put on our human behaviours are gone, equally concepts of 'agency'/will power', 'aggressivity', etc. If you go on youtube you can find very interesting analyses by Chess Champions such as Anna Rudolph explaining how non-natural, non-human that all looks (it also means the end of chess/Go champions in future, these machines have already played more combinations than ever were recorded in history for Chess and for Go...). This allows the solution of problems unthinkable to solve in real time, it requires a *very large* corpus of data to mine. Truly fascinating and v scary because the technology development is so far ahead of any societal and ethical control and that is not (yet) built into their system. Here is a starting point. The amygdala serves essential functions for cognition, putting 'valences' on cognitive objects. etc., and long-term memory consolidation, things that machines either don't need or are solving in other ways. If you are interested in the machine learning behind this that is now empowered by the ubiquity of data, here is another starting point.

Some AI research concerns machine learning in a defined problem-space, like learning to play Go, but a lot is (even in its inspiration) about seeking to realise animal capacities mechanically. Many AI researchers and their philosophical commentators say that the next hurdles for AI are creativity and subjective experience (understanding the last in terms of the folk-psychology described phenomenal characteristics of mental states). Work, for instance, has modelled in IA neural networks for human mindreading and 'theory of mind'. I'm not sure we're thinking of the same thing by 'folk psychology'. I get the idea you're imagining something like, 'everyone outside of the village has it in for me', while I only mean e.g. 'I was worried you wouldn't get home in time for supper'. Do you really want, in how we talk to each other, 'I was worried you wouldn't get home in time for supper', to be replaced with '[an exhaustive account of my brain-states before you got home e.g. memories of your arriving late; memories and projections of the food getting burnt and going cold, memories of subsequent arguments; sensory inputs; arousal and attentional states; the circuitry for conditioned responses, their sharpening and inhibition; the activation of task-focused modules, time-measurement modules, etc. etc. etc.]--all specified scientifically in close-grained neurological detail? It seems unlikely. Unlikely we will ever talk like that, and unlikely people will see the need to.

You know the mass displaces water, but the crow might just think it a tool that raises the food to the level of her beak.
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Assinalado
antao | 1 outra crítica | Jul 3, 2021 |
So those of us who care were already told that AlphaZero taught itself to play Chess by playing lots of games against itself. And this book tells us the same thing OVER and OVER again.

What AlphaZero looked for while it was playing all those games, what information it saved and how it used that information to make its timely move choices is entirely missing. (Saying that the program likes open files, open diagonals, and well posted knights is virtually meaningless. We all like those things, but at what cost?)

This book is much more like any game collection that features a single chessmaster except that AlphaZero's opponent is (nearly?) always Stockfish. Some (many?) of the games have already been published and analyzed. The analysis in Game Changer is interesting and presented with clear diagrams. It's a chess book. But if you want real information about AI and neural networks I think you need to look elsewhere.
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MLNJ | 1 outra crítica | Oct 17, 2019 |
Mathew Sadler has put more thought and creativity into this beautifully written chess book than several chess authors combined. He is a deep and original thinker, having returned to the echelons of top level chess after a break (and a career in finance).

He was famous for his Book Reviews in New in Chess, which showed a profound understanding of the game. His reviews would be discursive. He would present game fragments from his and other players' praxis before returning to the book being reviewed.

He uses a similar approach in this focused book sure to help a advancing player with a good grasp of theory find a repertoire and a plan.

His book is extremely well organized in thought into the following chapters.

1)How discovering ideas in the openings is not a matter of switching on an engine or a database, he explains analyses for a person with an already broad exposure to openings as he makes observations about recurring patterns (such as g5 pushes to secure outpost for Knight on e5) in different middle games from different openings.

2) Introducing new ideas into YOUR openings, a chapter on how you make an opening your own, (as some wit wrote some years ago, it is not that we are too good for the Ruy Lopez, it is that the Ruy Lopez is too good for us). He addresses several emotional attachments to openings that lose you points ( I paraphrase freely), and emphasises technical aspects of openings. How he analyzed the Dutch, showing several games from his own as well as Yusupov's praxis.

3) Playing Unorthodox Openings is perhaps the fairest look at offbeat openings at high level you are ever likely to see. It is not all a bed of roses. Yet, players like Speelman, Sadler, and in our times Nakamura have the nerve to play offbeat openings. What do they get out of it? Here is a good look. The English opening (..b6 and ..e6, with interesting theoretical lines) is amply supported with examples, and to a lesser extent the Pirc/modern complex.

4) Types of thinking in Middlegames is a 16 page essay with exercises that owes much to Dvoretsky. 4 types of thinking. Really useful to guide your choice of plan. These are the sort of stuff not every book talks about. THis is the kind of thing that makes this book a keeper (along with your first My System, or Pawn Power in chess, except this is way more advanced).
Finally 5) and 6) are That Didn't quite work out and Thinking in Endgames.
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Assinalado
sthitha_pragjna | Jan 11, 2014 |

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Obras
12
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3
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