Word: chess
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...most important info I gleaned from these online encounters is that "mafia" has evolved into a blanket term applied to gangs from Tokyo to St. Petersberg, and the new generation is gaining strength. With the addition of multicultural dons--from Colombian Gilberto "The Chess Player" Orejuela to Japanese godfather Yoshinori Watanabe--'90s gangland has become a politically correct industry in which drug smuggling, racketeering and prostitution rings are all equal opportunity employers, an image which, needless to say, warrants a trip down memory lane...
What the program lacked was intuition--the ability to set traps, hatch plots, smell danger and generally enact the violent and paranoid predator from which the human race evolved and to which all great chess players return. What's left is playing percentages. Deep Blue refused to follow a strategy it recognized as a likely loser, even one that any decent grand master could see offered the best chances for victory due to, say, a blunder by a rattled foe. The machine just didn...
...intuition remains solely the province of human intelligence, why not just fake it? Why not teach the machine how the chess building blocks it can understand relate to one another? Benjamin has spent the past year helping Deep Blue's programmers encode thousands of positional evaluation rules, leavening the program's computational prowess with what one might call street smarts. "The hardware can detect certain features of a chessboard," says Campbell. "Rooks on open files, pins, pawn structure. It's a matter of assigning weights to how important these features are in a given position...
...midtown hotel. Hands were shaken all around, but the smiles seemed a bit strained. There will be lots of emotion on both sides of the board come May 3. Everyone involved knows the match will make history, whichever way it goes. Last year's virgin Deep Blue campaign brought chess its widest audience since the Fischer-Spassky cold war match in 1972. "Chess is of secondary importance to the wider audience," says Kasparov, who nonetheless hopes to launch a chess-themed Website called Club Kasparov later this year. "It's the social contest. It's about the machine...
...right. Modern history teems with tales of the potential usurpation of mankind by its own technology: John Henry vs. the steam drill. Dr. Frankenstein vs. the monster. Linda Hamilton vs. the Terminator. The genius of chess lies in the sublime tension between logical analysis (call it Truth) and human intuition (call it Beauty). Our fascination with Deep Blue derives from fearful wonderment at the possibility that computers, which have already surpassed us at the former, may soon produce some chilling emulation of the latter. Kasparov, the latest standard bearer in humanity's war against our own obsolescence, is stoical...