Word: chess
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Maybe such a crisis is in order. It isn't just that as these machines get more powerful they do more jobs once done only by people, from financial analysis to secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn...
...Though chess has lately been the best-publicized measure of a machine's humanity, it is not the standard gauge. That was invented by the great British computer scientist Alan Turing in a 1950 essay in the journal Mind. Turing set out to address the question "Can machines think?" and proposed what is now called the Turing test. Suppose an interrogator is communicating by keyboard with a series of entities that are concealed from view. Some entities are people, some are computers, and the interrogator has to guess which is which. To the extent that a computer fools interrogators...
...lesson here--now dogma among researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI--is that the hardest thing for computers is the "simple" stuff. Sure they can play great chess, a game of mechanical rules and finite options. But making small talk--or, indeed, playing Trivial Pursuit--is another matter. So too with recognizing a face or recognizing a joke. As Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology likes to say, the biggest challenge is giving machines common sense. To pass the Turing test, you need some of that...
Besides, judging by the hubbub over the Kasparov match, even if computers could pass the test, debate would still rage over whether they think. No one doubted Deep Blue's chess skills, but many doubted whether it is a thinking machine. It uses "brute force"--zillions of trivial calculations, rather than a few strokes of strategic Big Think. ("You don't invite forklifts to weight-lifting competitions," an organizer of exclusively human chess tournaments said about the idea of man-vs.-machine matches.) On the other hand, there are chess programs that work somewhat like humans. They size...
Humans do this sort of thing all the time. But computers generally calculate each line of play so far as possible within the time allotted. Because chess is a game of virtually limitless possibilities, even a beast like Deep Blue, which can look at more than 100 million positions a second, can go only so deep. When computers reach that point, they evaluate the various resulting positions and select the move leading to the best one. And because computers' primary way of evaluating chess positions is by measuring material superiority, they are notoriously materialistic. If they "understood" the game, they...