Does quantum theory explain human consciousness and can chess prove it?

Sir Roger Penrose is a strong supporter of quantum consciosness. I also believe that quantum mechanics is involved with consciousness especially with the growing field of Quantum Biology.

Things like consciousness and self awareness can't be quantified in the same way intelligence can. Intelligence is closely tied to pattern recognition. So you can create intelligent algorithms that learn. These systems are intelligent.

Consciousness is something different. It allows us to have insights and intuition. We can connect things without the need for a pattern.

A chess problem could help scientists finally unravel whether quantum theory can explain human consciousness.

Oxford professor Sir Roger Penrose created the puzzle to prove the human mind can never be matched by a computer because it exhibits quantum effects.

This means the brain doesn't follow the rules for the classical properties of matter like a computer.

Instead, it follows rules for a new concept of matter altogether that leaves cracks for consciousness and intuition to appear.

Now, Sir Roger has set up a new institute to test his theory, and has invited everyday puzzle enthusiasts to pit their wits against the problem as part of his research.

www.dailymail.co.uk...





The puzzle appears to present white with an impossible situation.

With just four pawns and a king the player is hopelessly outnumbered.

Based on this information chess computers always assume that black will win.

But an average chess-playing human should be able to see that white can manage a draw, and even win if they can force black into an error.

The computer gets confused because the three black bishops open up so many possible moves and positions that it would take more than all of the computational power on Earth to calculate.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

I think Penrose is on the right track. I don't see why quantum effects would be prohibited from human consciousness when we're starting to see these effects more and more in nature. It's obvious why many people, especially materialist and atheist would be against this. Quantum effects being involved with consciousness makes what we call paranormal normal because of things like entanglement, superposition, non locality and more.

1. c7 Bxc7

Easy indeed.

I have always said human intuition trumps the computer. We blunder when we try to calculate too much.

ETA foolish already. Let me go back through that.

I let the black king out.




Right. Just push the King to c8, then push the pawn to c7. When the computer finally takes, it's stalemate. It takes a number of moves, but as long as white never takes, it is an inevitable draw.

Silly me for pushing that pawn first.


Yeah, when the King finally is able to get to a8, when the bishops have cleared the diagonal, then the pawn goes to c7. Black then has no choice but to take, or else 1. c8=Q#.

When black takes, the white king can't move.

It Is imperative for the computer to make sure a bishop is on d8 in order to force the draw.

I wonder if this same theory holds true with the newest chess AI trained with deep learning? I believe that opens up a whole new ballgame. See DeepMind mastering Go recently.

a reply to: TarzanBeta

So inspecting my previous post is an example of human intuition at work. It's not a branch system of calculating.

We first think forward like a computer and then fail. But if we see what the final position should be, we can work backwards from there. When we finally find the final position, then we calculate forward into the inevitable position, getting rid of an insane number of possibilities, assuming the other player is playing the best moves. If the opponent does not, then the position is won early.

Pretty easy to get a stalemate here.
Stay on white all his pieces are trapped besides the bishops on black

originally posted by: PokeyJoe
I wonder if this same theory holds true with the newest chess AI trained with deep learning? I believe that opens up a whole new ballgame. See DeepMind mastering Go recently.

Yes, with brute force calculation and memory of millions of games that it was fed and played against itself.

DeepMind has played more games against itself than the top 50 players combined have ever played.

A thousand year old (for all intents and purposes) memory and brute force barely beats out a young intuitive. Something to be said for that.

Interesting. White can just move his king willy-nilly on the light squares where the bishops cannot reach. Meanwhile Blacks huge material advantage is locked up in prison.

Hard to believe today's computers would self destruct and open the position for Black by capturing a rook.

originally posted by: o0oTOPCATo0o
Pretty easy to get a stalemate here.
Stay on white all his pieces are trapped besides the bishops on black

That would take too long. If you don't get the King to a8 and finally push to force the line, you'll be dying of thirst because of all of the possible positions before 3-fold repetition. Remember, the computer doesn't get hungry and doesn't offer a draw if white still has the capacity to make a mistake- taking any of the rooks or pushing the pawn first.

Besides, Always play to win. Force the opponent to feel the anxiety of c8=Q#.

originally posted by: SuicideKing33
Interesting. White can just move his king willy-nilly on the light squares where the bishops cannot reach. Meanwhile Blacks huge material advantage is locked up in prison.

Hard to believe today's computers would self destruct and open the position for Black by capturing a rook.

They wouldn't. If the computer was white, the computer would play for a8 also. It just wouldn't realize that's what it is playing for until the c7 square was clear first.

Let me rephrase that. A good engine wouldn't do that. ELO 2800+.

originally posted by: PokeyJoe
I wonder if this same theory holds true with the newest chess AI trained with deep learning? I believe that opens up a whole new ballgame. See DeepMind mastering Go recently.

Good points.

Deep Mind in Go and Libaratus in Poker are intelligent systems. They're not intuitive.

They don't learn from their experiences. For instance, a human can play poker and have insights about life. This is what Penrose is talking about.

Humans can take shortcuts and connect information where a computer would have to go step by step to get there and even then they won't make the same connections which cause each human to have a unique experience.

This is why some fear what's called dumb A.I. You can have a super intelligent system that's not conscious or self aware. This is also why some think true A.I. will need quantum circuitry.

A Quantum Walk Toward Artificial Intelligence

Your Android phone (or iPhone, if that's how you roll) is an impressive machine, with computing speeds and storage capacities thousands of times those of desktop PCs from only years ago. If Moore's Law holds up, your smart watch may outshine today's phones the way today's phones eclipse old PCs.

But no matter how powerful these machines become, they may never develop true intelligence if we continue to rely on conventional computing technology. According to the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review X last July, however, adding a dash of quantum mechanics could do the trick.

Quantum walks, on the other hand, describe a walker who doesn't exist at one spot at a time, but instead is distributed over many locations with varying probability of being at any one of them. Instead of taking a random step to the left or right for example, the quantum walker has taken both steps. There is some probability that you will find the walker in one place or the other, but until you make a measurement the walker exists in both.

That's not to say you'd need to make a full-blown quantum computer to build a truly intelligent machine - only part of an otherwise classical computer would need to be supplemented with a bit of quantum circuitry. That's good because progress toward developing a stand-alone quantum computer has been about as slow as the progress toward artificial intelligence. Combining artificial intelligence systems with quantum circuitry could be the recipe we need to build the HAL 9000s and R. Daneel Olivaws of the future.

physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com...

I put this in stockfish 7 which is one of the top engines. It's interesting because it gives black a huge advantage (-26.2) but the cpu for white will never move off of the white squares with the king. It's weird because the cpu can recognize draws. In this situation the cpu will never take with a pawn because the 3 pawn move possibilities ends up in a force checkmate for black in 9,7, or 6 moves. So the cpu will make infinite amount of accurate moves to force a draw but doesn't ever recognize a draw.

Oxford professor Sir Roger Penrose created the puzzle to prove the human mind can never be matched by a computer because it exhibits quantum effects.

If the computer is not a quantum computer that exhibits it's own quantum effects.

originally posted by: xenon129
I put this in stockfish 7 which is one of the top engines. It's interesting because it gives black a huge advantage (-26.2) but the cpu for white will never move off of the white squares with the king. It's weird because the cpu can recognize draws. In this situation the cpu will never take with a pawn because the 3 pawn move possibilities ends up in a force checkmate for black in 9,7, or 6 moves. So the cpu will make infinite amount of accurate moves to force a draw but doesn't ever recognize a draw.

Start the same puzzle with the white King on d7, with two black bishops on any black squares other than the ones on the a7-h2 diagonal, and another black bishop on f6. White to move.

That is a position that can be obtained from the puzzle. Stockfish 7 then should do a better job with the puzzle at that point.


I'm on a roll with mistakes today... a8 diagonal is white, dummy.

originally posted by: TarzanBeta
1. c7 Bxc7

Easy indeed.

I have always said human intuition trumps the computer. We blunder when we try to calculate too much.

ETA foolish already. Let me go back through that.

I let the black king out.



Right. Just push the King to c8, then push the pawn to c7. When the computer finally takes, it's stalemate. It takes a number of moves, but as long as white never takes, it is an inevitable draw.

Silly me for pushing that pawn first.

Yeah, when the King finally is able to get to a8, when the bishops have cleared the diagonal, then the pawn goes to c7. Black then has no choice but to take, or else 1. c8=Q#.

When black takes, the white king can't move.

It Is imperative for the computer to make sure a bishop is on d8 in order to force the draw.

But after the bishop takes the pawn, you would still be able to take a piece with one of your pawns.

originally posted by: o0oTOPCATo0o

originally posted by: TarzanBeta
1. c7 Bxc7

Easy indeed.

I have always said human intuition trumps the computer. We blunder when we try to calculate too much.

ETA foolish already. Let me go back through that.

I let the black king out.



Right. Just push the King to c8, then push the pawn to c7. When the computer finally takes, it's stalemate. It takes a number of moves, but as long as white never takes, it is an inevitable draw.

Silly me for pushing that pawn first.

Yeah, when the King finally is able to get to a8, when the bishops have cleared the diagonal, then the pawn goes to c7. Black then has no choice but to take, or else 1. c8=Q#.

When black takes, the white king can't move.

It Is imperative for the computer to make sure a bishop is on d8 in order to force the draw.

But after the bishop takes the pawn, you would still be able to take a piece with one of your pawns.

True.
So after my line then:

1. cxb5+ Qxb5
2. bxa4 (if the Queen takes here, it's an immediate draw, so...that's the last hope against a human because) b3 and black is winning. White resigns.

So it does seem to be a matter of dancing back and forth for thousands of iterations before the 3-fold repetition.

That's when I lose. I try so hard to win. Hate draws. Especially ones that have more iterations than there are atoms in my beer.

a reply to: o0oTOPCATo0o

So then my previous line works if the computer forgets to keep a bishop on the diagonal or d8, and not close enough and alone for me to take.



Computer won't blunder that though. A human would.

a reply to: neoholographic

Quantum Chess

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Chris Cantwell

Two years ago, as a graduate student in Physics at USC,  I began work on a game whose mechanics were based on quantum mechanics. When I had a playable version ready, my graduate adviser, Todd Brun, put me in contact with IQIM’s Spiros Michalakis, who had already worked with Google to design qCraft, a mod introducing quantum mechanics into Minecraft. Spiros must have seen potential in my clunky prototype and our initial meeting turned into weekly brainstorming lunches at Caltech’s Chandler cafeteria. More than a year later, the game had evolved into Quantum Chess and we began talking about including a video showing some gameplay at an upcoming Caltech event celebrating Feynman’s quantum legacy. The next few months were a whirlwind. Somehow this video turned into a Quantum Chess battle for the future of humanity, between Stephen Hawking and Paul Rudd. And it was being narrated by Keanu Reeves! The video, called Anyone Can Quantum, and directed by Alex Winter, premiered at Caltech’s One Entangled Evening on January 26, 2016 and has since gone viral. If you haven’t watched it, now would be a good time to do so (if you are at work, be prepared to laugh quietly).

All pawns move the same as they would in standard chess, but all other pieces get a choice of two movement types, standard or quantum. Standard moves act exactly as they would in standard chess. However, quantum moves, create superposition's. Let’s look at an example of a quantum move for the white queen.

So, let’s talk about moving the queen, again. You may be wondering, “What happens if I want to move a piece that is in a superposition?” The queen exists in two spaces. You choose which of those two positions you would like to move from, and you can perform the same standard or quantum moves from that space. Let’s look at trying to perform a standard move, instead of a quantum move, on the queen that now exists in a superposition. The result would be as follows:

quantumfrontiers.com...

a reply to: Kashai

I've played quantum chess. It's interesting, but it's more akin to gambling. A good move becomes an otherwise terrible move.

It's a little frustrating because chess isn't a dice game.

Yes often it is considered that in chess clocks are the only variable....

Dice chess can refer to a number of chess variants in which dice are used to alter gameplay; specifically that the moves available to each player are determined by rolling a pair of ordinary six-sided dice. There are many different variations of this form of dice chess.[1] One of them is described here.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: xenon129

That is really strange that stockfish 7 can't recognize the draw?
Its pretty common when facing a strong opponent that the best strategy is to drop the complexity with an aggressive mid game pruning.