Word: chess
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WHEN GARRY KASPAROV FACED OFF AGAINST AN IBM COMPUTER in last month's celebrated chess match, he wasn't just after more fame and money. By his own account, the world chess champion was playing for you, me, the whole human species. He was trying, as he put it shortly before the match, to "help defend our dignity...
Nice of him to offer. But if human dignity has much to do with chess mastery, then most of us are so abject that not even Kasparov can save us. If we must vest the honor of our species in some quintessentially human feat and then defy a machine to perform it, shouldn't it be something the average human can do? Play a mediocre game of Trivial Pursuit, say? (Or lose to Kasparov in chess...
...Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in the world and quite possibly the best chess player who ever lived, sat down across a chessboard from a machine, an IBM computer called Deep Blue, and lost...
Indeed Kasparov, who a few weeks ago single-handedly took on the entire national chess team of Brazil, was so confident of winning that he rejected the offer that the $500,000 purse be split 60-40 between winner and loser. Kasparov insisted on winner-take-all. They settled on 80-20. (What, by the way, does Deep Blue do with its 100-grand purse? New chips...
Blue's omniscience will make it omnipotent. It can play--fight--with the abandon of an immortal. Wilhelm Steinitz, a world chess champion who was even more eccentric than most, once claimed to have played chess with God, given him an extra pawn and won. Fine. But how would he have done against Blue...