Yiming Zhang didn’t grow up playing chess. Like many other people, the Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student discovered the Netflix series «The Queen’s Gambit» during the pandemic and began playing online. However, he .
Yiming Zhang didn’t grow up playing chess. Like many other people, the Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student discovered the Netflix series «The Queen’s Gambit» during the pandemic and began playing online. However, he quickly realized how unnatural it felt playing against chess bots.
«After I learned the rules, I was in the bottom 10%, maybe 20% of players online», said Zhang, who is part of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) in CMU’s School of Computer Science. «For beginners, it’s not interesting or instructive to play against chess bots because the moves they make are often bizarre and incomprehensible to humans.»
Zhang’s frustration led him to develop Allie, a chess bot powered by artificial intelligence that demonstrates the benefits of AI tools that think like humans. He believes training future AI systems to ponder and deliberate on complex problems could create better agents for use in therapy, education and medicine.
«There’s been an obsession with building superhuman AI that’s better at math or other reasoning tasks than most humans», said Daphne Ippolito, Zhang’s advisor and an assistant professor in the LTI.
