Word: kasparov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...week since computers became the best chess-playing species on earth, we homo sapiens have proved that we remain world champs in at least one cognitive domain: rationalizing defeat. While Garry Kasparov was spending his post-match press conference accusing IBM of cheating, commentators around the world were finding other ways to minimize Deep Blue's triumph. CHESS, SHMESS! COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T HANDLE THE TOUGH STUFF, said the headline on a Boston Globe article that noted how much trouble machines have understanding a sentence or telling a dog from a cat. Britain's Daily Telegraph observed that computers "cannot...
Maybe the idea here was to dampen the economic insecurity induced by Deep Blue. During the Kasparov match, there were many references to John Henry, who in legend died trying to defend his job against the incessant march of technology--in his case, the steam-powered drill. After pondering that outcome, and Deep Blue's triumph, people naturally find it reassuring to be reminded that chess is an artificial endeavor, hardly central to our lives or our livelihoods, and that computers still can't make meaningful small talk...
...this sense, the real-world competition is rarely human vs. machine, as it was with Kasparov. It's one kind of tool vs. another kind of tool.Thus the steam drill wasn't really challenging John Henry; it was challenging his sledgehammer. It's the guy using the steam drill who was challenging John Henry. Similarly, the bank teller's competitor is not so much the atm as the people who design the machine or those who build it or service it. Functionally speaking, they're just bank tellers using new tools. And that's all the old bank teller really...
Interestingly, programmers have reacted to this law of diminishing returns to faster processing by reintroducing heuristics into the computer's algorithm. Grandmaster Joel Benjamin spent a year "training" Deep Blue for its match with Kasparov. What did Benjamin do? He helped the programmers refine Deep Blue's evaluation function to incorporate human "feeling" about how good a position is and he helped Deep Blue zone in on the kinds of moves a human grandmaster would intuitively leap to analyze. Of course, Deep Blue relies primarily on brute force, and it is still very much an open question what the optimal...
...programmers were remarkably successful in making Deep Blue's play resemble the best aspects of human chess players. Grandmaster commentators repeatedly referred to its moves as "creative" and as being indicative of "a deep understanding of chess." In fact, Kasparov, who trained for this match by preparing against "computer-ish" moves, thought Deep Blue's moves were so unlike the typical computer that he has accused the IBM team of tinkering with Deep Blue during the game...