Word: chesse
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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News of Deep Blue's victory over reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been splattered across newspapers everywhere, including our very own Crimson. But what does it all mean? Does it deserve the status of an historic event? Has IBM built artificial intelligence, or does a devoted chess-playing super-computer deserve the same status as an electronic pencil sharpener...
Richard Reti, the great Czech grandmaster of the first half of the 20th century might be though to have proposed an answer in his response to a question as to how many moves he prepared ahead in a chess game. "Only one," he replied, "but it is always the best move...
Reti was joking, of course. Grandmasters typically look about five moves ahead in a given position, and sometimes many more. But Reti's quip captures something at the heart of human chess-playing ability: intuition. And in so far as humans rely on intuition rather than calculation for the decisions of everyday life, his statement captures what is at the heart of human intelligence more generally...
What we can agree on, however, is that IBM has created a computer that plays chess very well. And insofar as playing chess well is something that we think only intelligent beings can do, it can thus be said that a computer was constructed which displays one aspect of intelligent behavior. But one might object that Deep Blue just does a whole lot of calculations very quickly, and that's not intelligence...
Indeed, most modern computer scientists would not consider Deep Blue an intelligent machine. And yet, ironically, this very fact underscores how much has been learned in the field of artificial intelligence. This is because the earliest efforts to create intelligent machines involved trying to program computers to play chess. In the first experiments, computers were modeled to play chess like humans--in a given position, the computers examined a small set of moves according to the heuristics that good human players seemed to use. The scientists were shocked to learn that the computers played miserably...