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KF5JRV > TECH 22.05.16 14:12l 63 Lines 3673 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Kasparov Loses
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Sent: 160522/1201Z 3408@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ1.4.65
Kasparov Loses to Deep Blue: The First Time a Human Chess Player Loses to a
Computer Under Tournament Conditions May 11, 1997
On May 11, 1997 Gary Kasparov, sometimes regarded as the greatest chess player
of all time, resigned 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000
SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per
second. This was the first time that a human world chess champion lost to a
computer under tournament conditions.
The event, which took place at the Equitable Center in New York, was broadcast
live from IBM's website via a Java viewer, and became the world's record "Net
event" at the time.
"Since the emergence of artificial intelligence and the first computers in
the late 1940s, computer scientists compared the performance of these 'giant
brains' with human minds, and gravitated to chess as a way of testing the
calculating abilities of computers. The game is a collection of challenging
problems for minds and machines, but has simple rules, and so is perfect for
such experiments.
"Over the years, many computers took on many chess masters, and the computers
lost.
"IBM computer scientists had been interested in chess computing since the
early 1950s. In 1985, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University,
Feng-hsiung Hsu, began working on his dissertation project: a chess playing
machine he called ChipTest. A classmate of his, Murray Campbell, worked on the
project, too, and in 1989, both were hired to work at IBM Research. There,
they continued their work with the help of other computer scientists,
including Joe Hoane, Jerry Brody and C. J. Tan. The team named the project
Deep Blue. The human chess champion won in 1996 against an earlier version of
Deep Blue; the 1997 match was billed as a 'rematch.'
"The champion and computer met at the Equitable Center in New York, with
cameras running, press in attendance and millions watching the outcome. The
odds of Deep Blue winning were not certain, but the science was solid. The
IBMers knew their machine could explore up to 200 million possible chess
positions per second. The chess grandmaster won the first game, Deep Blue took
the next one, and the two players drew the three following games. Game 6 ended
the match with a crushing defeat of the champion by Deep Blue."
"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but
dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had
imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the
world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like
a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a
machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess
board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor
Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000
book, How to Build a Mind:
" 'By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using
computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the
Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers,
but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead
our lives.'
"It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the
members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your
programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million
alarm clock made me feel any better" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the
Computer," The New York Review of Books, 57, February 11, 2010).
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