It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.
Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance.
Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.
Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.
...comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What's more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you'll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.
Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?
All experiments that are related to the games when you have humans versus machines in the games - whether it's chess or "Go" or any other game - machines will prevail not because they can solve the game. Chess is mathematically unsolvable. But at the end of the day, the machine doesn't have to solve the game. The machine has to win the game. And to win the game, it just has to make fewer mistakes than humans. Which is not that difficult since humans are humans and vulnerable, and we don't have the same steady hand as the computer.
Nowadays, a 13-year-old would probably know more than Bobby Fischer knew when he retired. They analyse all the moves and prepare themselves on their computers. But that doesn’t mean they are special.
It's interesting that the greatest minds of computer science, the founding fathers, like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, they all looked at chess as the ultimate test. So they thought, "Oh, if a machine can play chess, and beat strong players, set aside a world champion, that would be the sign of a dawn of the AI era." With all due respect, they were wrong.
I would say, you have a unique chance of learning more about the game of chess with your computer than Bobby Fischer, or even myself, could manage throughout our entire lives. What is very important is that you will use this power productively and you will not be hijacked by the computer screen. Always keep your personality intact.
Remember that the machine is there to help you, because at the end of the day, you're not playing freestyle chess, advanced chess, human-plus-machine. If you are playing against other humans, it's about winning the game. The machine will not be assisting you, unless you are cheating of course. And since the machine is not there, you have to make sure that everything you learn from the computer will not badly affect the way you play the real game.
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