Can a Bayesian spam filter play chess?

Introduction

Many people these days depend on Bayesian filters to protect them from the ever present email scourge that is spam. Unlike older technologies, these programs' claim to fame is that they learn the spam patterns automatically, and more importantly, learn personalized spam (bad) and ham (good) email patterns.

Like many others, I wrote a Bayesian filter to protect me from unwanted email, which I called dbacl. My implementation functions as a Unix command line text classifier, with special email support, and can be used with procmail.

People are often astonished at how well statistical mail filtering works after they first try it, and it's tempting to imagine that such programs actually understand the emails being delivered, rather than merely matching patterns.

Now chess has always been a popular gauge of intelligence that everyone can understand, so if we put all these ideas together, then the question "Can a Bayesian spam filter play chess?" seems like a fun experiment with a lot of appeal.

Let's put down some ground rules: This experiment will test a real spam filter, not a specially designed chess program. It won't aim to beat Deep Thought (I wouldn't know where to start, and I have a feeling this could be difficult anyway ;-), but it will aim to show signs of "intelligence", or we won't claim success. Finally, since dry tables and graphs are no fun, a theoretical proof of concept is not enough: the spam filter must really play chess in a way that everyone can see, and try out at home.

The account below is designed so that you can follow and duplicate it by yourself. All you need is a Unix compatible computer. You'll have to open a terminal and be ready to type shell commands. All shell commands below are preceded by % to indicate the prompt, but you don't type the '%'. Instructions are fairly detailed, and various scripts can be downloaded when needed, but it helps if you're familiar with the shell. Ask a friend if you need help.

Important: You must follow these instructions if you want to actually play chess against the spam filter. You must also download some training games and teach the filter beforehand. Running the scripts alone is not enough. The instructions have been tested and work correctly on a GNU system with the bash shell.

Start by making a directory to keep all the workings in one place.

% mkdir chess
% cd chess