Word: kasparov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Apparently not. As Kasparov suspected, his duel with Deep Blue indeed became an icon in musings on the meaning and dignity of human life. While the world monitored his narrow escape from a historic defeat--and at the same time marked the 50th birthday of the first real computer, ENIAC--he seemed to personify some kind of identity crisis that computers have induced in our species...
...cannot see everything forever--just everything within its horizon, which for Deep Blue means everything that can happen within the next 10 or 15 moves or so. The very best human player could still beat it (as Kasparov did subsequently) because he can intuit--God knows how--what the general shape of things will be 20 moves from...
...Kasparov himself said that with Deep Blue, quantity had become quality. When you can calculate so fast and so far, you rise to another level. At some point that happened in biology. There are neurons firing in lemmings and squid, but put them together in gigantic enough numbers and fantastic enough array, as in humans--and, behold, a thought, popping up like a cartoon bubble from the brain...