digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

Can a SPAM filter play Chess??

dbacl.sourceforge.net — This may appear at first a strange question to ask, somewhat like asking if a pocket calculator can swim. However, it turns out that the chess experiment is doable, and strangely appealing.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • userax, on 11/10/2007, -3/+96A strange game. The only winning move is not to play...
    • Synapse84, on 11/04/2007, -1/+23How about a nice game of chess?
    • MacGyver2210, on 11/04/2007, -3/+16How about Global Thermonuclear War?
      http://www.everybody-dies.com/
      • DeathGod321, on 11/04/2007, -0/+7Why is MacGyver promoting global thermonuclear war?
        • freff, on 11/05/2007, -0/+8Yeah, I know. Who needs a nuclear warhead when you have plenty of paperclips, magnets and rubberbands at hand?
      • Audacitor, on 11/05/2007, -0/+3I've got that game. Awesome, is it not?
    • zeromancer, on 11/04/2007, -0/+1"You know what's so elegant about this little game? Nobody knows where the enemy is. They don't even know he exists. He's in every one of their heads, and they trust him because they think they are him. If you try to destroy him to save them, they'll destroy you to save him. It's beautiful man. You have to admire the opponent's elegance."

      - Avi, Revolver
  • str3ama, on 11/05/2007, -1/+28Dugg for the futility of uselessness!
  • xTRUMANx, on 11/04/2007, -1/+21You know what I noticed: this was the first time I saw some tutorial on the web that told people not to type '%' when entering in the bash commands. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to figure that out during my first time I used bash commands.
    • oneoverzero, on 11/04/2007, -0/+2If it was something that you are expected to copy and paste, then the tutorial is bad if they put in the $, %, or #.
      Otherwise, it's not that necessary anyway.
      Many (most that i've seen) tutorials assume you have admin. access,and if you need root they say 'sudo ' or 'sudo bash' (if you need root for the whole thing (compiling a kernel is one of the few situations i can think of where a tutorial would need that much root)).
      The tutorials that don't need any kind of admin or root access don't need to write % because either A) it's being performed by someone with very limited knowledge of unix who would be confused by the % or B) The person doing it has enough experience that they would understand it is implied.
      Also, the writer of the tutorial could write "run this as root", "run this as admin" or just simply "run this".
      I understand that it is a convention, and it can help, and many terminals export their logs as text files (with the prefix included), but still, a post like yours is good evidence that it may do more harm than good.
    • richbradshaw, on 11/04/2007, -1/+5Isn't it $ for user, # for root?
      • eosp, on 11/05/2007, -0/+5In csh (yes, some still use it), it's % for everyone.
        • tech42er, on 11/03/2007, -0/+1Yeah, but the author said he did it in bash. Something doesn't add up.
        • burke, on 11/05/2007, -0/+2All he'd have to have done is `export PS2='%'`. People use it for various reasons. Mine is a green % as user and a red % as root. (come to think of it, I use zsh, but my point stands)
    • Audacitor, on 11/04/2007, -0/+2Just to let you know, you're not alone. Me too.
    • djlosch, on 11/05/2007, -0/+1the same thing often happens with <whatever>
  • ThreeDee912, on 11/04/2007, -4/+4This is somewhat like how Apple integrated Mail.app's bayesian spam filter into Leopard's parental controls to filter out adult content on the web, including the various proxies and whatnot. Maybe someone could come up with a filter that organizes mail into categories, not just "Inbox" and "Spam".
    • gattone, on 11/05/2007, -2/+241. Increase your penis
      1.a. Up to 3 inches
      1.b. Up to 2 inches
      2. Become rich
      2.a. Dead Nigerian president's banking account
      2.b. Dead relatives' banking account
      3...
    • NoMoreNinj4s, on 11/05/2007, -0/+4I believe the mail client built into Opera does this. It's a really neat feature, and something I'd hoped would show up in other clients.
    • ogremidget, on 11/04/2007, -0/+4Yeah, its called Bacn. Bacon is better than Spam (what isn't) so Bacn is all that stuff you want to read, but may not have time to read right now. If you have Gmail you can create a label and some filters to accomplish this. http://www.bacn2.com/?p=3
  • KnightMareInc, on 11/04/2007, -2/+16this just makes me smile for some reason.
  • vofuse, on 11/04/2007, -48/+6VOTE RON PAUL!
    • clothmonkey, on 11/04/2007, -6/+7Dammit, stop making the rational RP fans look bad! Dumbass.
      • freff, on 11/05/2007, -3/+1Rational RP fans? What an odd grouping of words.
        • Marijuana, on 11/05/2007, -0/+2You're not one of us. You're one of THEM. You neo-commie.
  • MisterNetHead, on 11/05/2007, -23/+12Cool, but how about we link straight to the article?
    http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess-1.html
    • poracious, on 11/05/2007, -0/+23Wow. I'm all for bitching about people linking to Random Blog X, but bitching about people linking to the article's INTRO PAGE? That's sad.
    • NikoKun, on 11/04/2007, -0/+8Yeah wow... If you'd notice, that is the Intro Page to the article, that he linked too, Not some "click here", redirect web page!... How can you bitch at someone for linking to the Intro? That's like Congratulating someone for linking an article to it's second page! =P
  • donkeySays, on 11/08/2007, -0/+43My calculator can swim for a short period of time but after that it stops working for a really long time.
    • arunforce, on 11/05/2007, -0/+3HAH. My TI-89 can turn into a boat.
      • burke, on 11/04/2007, -0/+1The Titanium has a mode to solve the universe too.
  • limoo, on 11/04/2007, -11/+1Bah. The way it's set up, you can even claim a die or coin can play chess. No awareness of board configuration (just a sequence of moves), randomization, no idea of the cost of each move... the list goes on.
    • fcukbush, on 11/04/2007, -0/+8Yeah, Computers aren't people.. Thanks for that shocking revelation.
    • TaeBoX, on 11/03/2007, -0/+4For real, did you RTFA? He addresses that.
      • limoo, on 11/08/2007, -1/+0Yeah, I did RTFA. He mentions an issue and proceeds to address it by adding a randomizer. Thus instead of choosing the best move based on what it knows, it then chooses a move that's less than optimal just to provide more entertaining play. How's that different from playing against a coin toss? Imagine a chess grandmaster thinking, "Ooh, I know I should probably move up my rook to defend against the checkmate in 2 moves, but just for fun, I'll send out my knight in a random direction to see what happens."

        He also mentions the lack of awareness of board configuration but does nothing. His problem is the way he encodes the moves to be highly dependent on absolute position rather than relative positions.
  • bitt3n, on 11/05/2007, -0/+26Answer: Yes, it can play chess!
    Just not as well as a Nigerian finance minister.
  • roberto_deneero, on 11/04/2007, -10/+4I can has checkmatez?
  • Assaylant, on 11/04/2007, -4/+0If he had instead converted the board state into a 30-character word, he could have used the same method to determine moves more effectively.
    All the information was available as well. Simply compute the current board state based on earlier moves (of which he has a complete list) and feed that information into his spam filter instead of this half-move nonsense.
    I like the idea, however.
  • wilhoitm, on 11/04/2007, -0/+3This is the start of SKYNET if it starts to learn at a geometric rate!
  • johnnyrotten, on 11/04/2007, -0/+2Why not? Years ago, Dave Hitz turned vi into a Turing Machine.
  • dmann, on 11/04/2007, -1/+6wow, i understood about 11 words of that after about 2 pages.... it sounded cool, til he started explaining how he made a spam filter play chess, but uh, Humperty Doo, im dumb.
  • Error601, on 11/04/2007, -0/+3A novel idea, but I don't think I would have spent that much time on it, because playing chess based on move history rather than board state seems like a bad premise. It would be interesting to train it using all the post-move board states of the winning player and see how it does.
    • Cerin, on 11/04/2007, -0/+0I agree. Even if he had pre-processed his training games a little to include which pieces are captured, that would have improved performance dramatically. It would have quickly learned that capturing a queen leads to a win far more often than capturing a pawn.
  • nextbgates95, on 11/03/2007, -3/+1Gmail's could.
  • Humptydank, on 11/08/2007, -0/+14How about we get them filtering spam first?
  • H080J03, on 11/04/2007, -0/+7What would be cool if we could get spam filters to play each other, then we can finally see witch one is better.
  • OpticalLiam, on 11/04/2007, -0/+5But can it play a game of thermonuclear war?
  • bob7, on 11/08/2007, -0/+21This of course begs the question, "Could a chess engine filter spam?"
  • ZeRux, on 11/03/2007, -0/+2Apparently this has been on digg a while ago (no that it matters):

    http://digg.com/software/Teaching_a_spam_filter_to ...
    • Odindon, on 11/06/2007, -0/+0
      Woot ZeRux good job on finding that and calling this guy out!
  • ryodoan, on 11/04/2007, -0/+1My question is since it learns from old games, what is to stop you from pitting it against itself in a never ending loop having both sides learn from their wins / losses?
    • JRootabega, on 11/04/2007, -0/+0I will.
    • Cerin, on 11/06/2007, -0/+1Nothing, aside from quality of play. You could definitely program it to play against itself, and have it learn from it's own mistakes. The only problem is that the program's an exceptionally bad player, so it would learn from itself very slowly, compared to simply training it on the games of expert players.
  • ttamshadbolt, on 11/06/2007, -0/+6"Like many others, I wrote a Bayesian filter to protect me from unwanted email"

    Way too much time on his hands
  • colifis, on 11/05/2007, -0/+3Geez, I hope that research was for college credit or something. That was a lot of work just for the sake of making a spam filter play chess. Still cool though ...
  • Flashman, on 11/04/2007, -0/+1There's a line in a Cory Doctorow story about the first artificial intelligences evolving from the battle between spammers and spam filters... and reading this, it suddenly seems less far-fetched.
  • Gordo0852, on 11/05/2007, -1/+2My head is about to explode.
  • Clevelandsteemr, on 11/05/2007, -2/+0no
  • wimmers, on 11/05/2007, -0/+1SPAM = Food - a treat almost as good as bacon.
    Spam = Larger pen1s adverts.
  • Odindon, on 11/06/2007, -0/+0He wasted alot of time, I wasted even more reading that. Its good its smart and all, but all I need it to do is filter spam?
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.