Word: chess
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...mean? I had played a lot of computers but had never experienced anything like this. I could feel--I could smell--a new kind of intelligence across the table. While I played through the rest of the game as best I could, I was lost; it played beautiful, flawless chess the rest of the way and won easily...
Garry Kasparov is still the chess champion of the world...
Compared with beating the world's greatest chess player at his own game, of course, infant-like flailing or knowing about wetness might not sound like much. But programs like CYC and Cog, not chess machines like Deep Blue, currently define the cutting edge of applied artificial intelligence--the 40-year effort to build machines that think. Ten years ago, when AI was as hot as the Internet is today, researchers raced to build programs that showed deep expertise in a narrow field of endeavor--like chess, for example, or medical diagnosis. These days, however, it's the promise...
...with the proliferation of cheap, powerful computers and the rapid growth of the Internet, there's new interest in all kinds of "intelligent" machinery--not just chess-playing supercomputers or grandiose AI research projects like CYC and Cog. The past few years have seen a burst of entrepreneurial activity in what are called intelligent agents--programs of rather more modest IQ that are nonetheless smart enough to be released on the Internet to do small, useful chores like tracking stock prices or digging for nuggets of research data...
That isn't what AI set out to achieve 40 years ago. But artificial intelligence tends to be a moving target; once a computer can do something--like play tic-tac-toe or even chess--that behavior no longer seems to require much thought. If anything unites AI's increasingly diverse strategies for building machines that think, however, it's that they all require us to stretch our notions of what human thought really is. "We need to be prepared," warns Ray, "for an intelligence that is very different from...