To me, one of the interesting side notes to the match was how, with time, Kasparov anthropomorphized the machine. He was unwilling to allow that the machine, the "creature" as he called it, could have arrived at those sparkling moves using "computer logic". He darkly doubted the motives of IBM. He even insisted on being able to view the logic that the computer was using. What did he suspect? That Anand, Kramnik and Kamsky had gotten together and were playing against him?
Deep Blue is a massively parallel machine that runs several processors, definitely not the wimpy thing you have at home. The idea of building such powerful computers doesn't bother too many people. Somehow, we have come to accept that machines can compute awesomely but do not yet accept that such computation can lead to intelligence of sorts. But even run-of-the-mill computer programs often exhibit "intelligence" now. A meteorologist studying the performance of a fuzzy logic algorithm that I helped develop noted that:
[The detected BWER is] in a right spot, but if you cross section the reflectivity structure of the storm, you don't see a BWER. In other words, it looks like it made a good guess with limited data."Guessing" was not how I would describe it. I know the internal workings of the algorithm and it was a logical progression from the limited data to the correct detection. Yet, if a thinking human being had gone through the same process, we would have called it "guessing".
Does this mean that man has lost the battle to the machine? Hardly. For one, Kasparov has lost matches before and has come back to thrash his opponent. Two, the machine is still a machine in that it computes while the human is a human in that he can think imaginatively. Three, none of the man vs. machine brouhahas that arose in the past few centuries has come to anything.
We accept that machines are better in that limited aspect of existence and get on with our productive, creative lives. After all, trains have been running faster than men and calculators roundly beating the mental arithmetic afficionados for quite some time now. Not too many people feel humiliated as a result.
