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     Forums                    Can a Bayesian spam filter play chess?
      CVS
    Download                                        by Laird A. Breyer

                               Introduction
  Laird Breyer
    Download                   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

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