Re:The Chess Master and the Computer
by jacquesm on Thursday December 30, 2010 @09:46PM
(#2054334)
Writing a chess program is a creative activity :)
What computers 'can do' is limited by our imagination and our ability to express ourselves. As Kasparov points out in the article as soon as IBM had the publicity they wanted (to win from the best human chess player at any cost) they scrapped the project.
But the contest was meaningless the way it was posed anyway. Personally I think that the best way to deal with the situation would have been to 'handicap' the computer to use the same amount of resources that the human has access to, so a given power budget and no access to pre-programmed libraries. That would make the contest much more interesting, and more importantly would drive forward our thinking about solving this sort of problem in an intelligent way instead of using the sledge-hammer of brute force.
What computers 'can do' is limited by our imagination and our ability to express ourselves. As Kasparov points out in the article as soon as IBM had the publicity they wanted (to win from the best human chess player at any cost) they scrapped the project.
But the contest was meaningless the way it was posed anyway. Personally I think that the best way to deal with the situation would have been to 'handicap' the computer to use the same amount of resources that the human has access to, so a given power budget and no access to pre-programmed libraries. That would make the contest much more interesting, and more importantly would drive forward our thinking about solving this sort of problem in an intelligent way instead of using the sledge-hammer of brute force.