Why do you keep trying to argue against discounting using an example where discounting is inappropriate by definition? The objective in chess is to win. It doesn’t matter whether you win in 5 moves or 50 moves. There is no discounting. Looking at this example tells us nothing about whether we should discount future increments of utility in creating a utility function.
Temporal discounting is about valuing something happening today more than the same thing happening tomorrow.
Chess computers do, in fact discount. That is why they do prefer to mate you in twenty moves rather than a hundred.
The values of a chess computer do not just tell it to win. In fact, they are complex—e.g. Deep Blue had an evaluation function that was split into 8,000 parts.
Operation consists of maximising the utility function, after foresight and tree pruning. Events that take place in branches after tree pruning has truncated them typically don’t get valued at all—since they are not forseen. Resource-limited chess computers can find themselves preferring to promote a pawn sooner rather than later. They do so since they fail to see the benefit of sequences leading to promotion later.
Temporal discounting is about valuing something happening today more than the same thing happening tomorrow.
Chess computers do, in fact discount. That is why they do prefer to mate you in twenty moves rather than a hundred.
The values of a chess computer do not just tell it to win. In fact, they are complex—e.g. Deep Blue had an evaluation function that was split into 8,000 parts.
Operation consists of maximising the utility function, after foresight and tree pruning. Events that take place in branches after tree pruning has truncated them typically don’t get valued at all—since they are not forseen. Resource-limited chess computers can find themselves preferring to promote a pawn sooner rather than later. They do so since they fail to see the benefit of sequences leading to promotion later.