COMPUTER MAY BE SMARTER THAN WE THINK.

Byline: Bruce Weber The New York Times

As the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, rallied from behind and stormed to victory last week over Deep Blue, the IBM computer that is the newest and strongest inanimate challenger to human chess supremacy, the sanctity of human intelligence seemed to dodge a bullet. People remain the smartest things on the planet - for a little while longer, anyway.

Or so the prevailing sentiment would have it.

But for many cognitive scientists, computer experts and philosophers, the question is not which entity is more intelligent. Rather, it's: What is intelligence, anyway? And the smart answer is: It depends on whom you ask.

Both Kasparov and his adviser on computers, Frederick Friedel, said this week that they believe Deep Blue, with its vast computational excavations into each chess position, had begun to show signs of artificial intelligence, the first they had ever sensed from a machine.

"As it goes deeper and deeper, it displays elements of strategic understanding," Friedel said of Deep Blue. "Somewhere out there, mere tactics are translating into strategy. This is the closest thing I've seen to computer intelligence. It's a weird form of intelligence, the beginning of intelligence. But you can feel it. You can smell it."

Herbert Simon, a professor of computer science, psychology and philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, concurred. Any computer thinks to some degree, he said, when it brings to bear the element of problem solving he calls selectivity - that is, a sense of knowing where to look in its warehouse of information for its answer to a question.

Human thought, he said, consists of, "first, a great capacity for recognition, and second, a capability for selective research."

Deep Blue has to be considered a thinker, he said, because along with its colossal ability "to spin its wheels" - the brute-force calculation that is the traditional strength of computers - it also has a sophisticated evaluation system. In other words, Deep Blue, like a human being, does not have to search out each and every possible chess move to discover the best option; it has the ability, programmed in its software, to recognize useless possibilities and discard them along the way, a function that increases its efficiency.

This, of course, is what a human chess player does; Kasparov cannot match the computer's searching speed, but with his intuition and experience, he does not have to. He recognizes fruitlessness instinctively.

It was in 1957 that Simon, whose lifelong research has focused on the human thought process and who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1978, predicted that a computer would be the world chess champion within a decade; in that service, he helped design a computer program that tried to emulate the thought processes of a grandmaster.

That he proved to be wrong does not diminish the accomplishment of Deep Blue, he said. With its powerful amalgam of brute force and selectivity, Deep Blue's process is not unlike what humans do, if different in the ratio of its elements.

There are different types of thinking, he added, "but I would call what Deep Blue does thinking."

Baloney, said John R. Searle, a philosophy professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "The Rediscovery of the Mind," (MIT Press, 1992), which argues against the possibility of mechanical thought.

"From a purely mathematical point of view," Searle said, "chess is a trivial game because there's perfect information about it. For any given position there's an optimal move; it's solvable. It's not like football or war. It's a great game for us because our minds can't see the solution, but the fact that we will build machines that can do it better than we can is no more important than the fact that we can build pocket calculators that can add and subtract better than we can."

Searle scoffed at Friedel's sense that the calculating power of Deep Blue had begun to evince the feel of an intelligent being.

"I could say the same thing about my pocket calculator," he said. "In the early days, I could outwit it. Divide 10 by 3, then multiply that by 3 again. You wouldn't get 10 again; you'd get 9.999999. Now, they have tricks to solve that. But in order to get human intelligence, you've got to be conscious. Does the computer worry about its next move? Does it worry about whether its wife is bored by the length of the games?"

Virtually everyone seems to agree on two things. One is that it is inevitable that a computer will eventually be the world chess champion. The other is that whatever the accomplishment of Deep Blue, the accomplishment of its creators is sublime.

"In building a path-breaking, successful program, the IBM team has definitely demonstrated artistry that is impressive and moving," said David Gelernter, the Yale art historian and computer scientist. "But the artistry is on display in the code, the program they wrote, more than in the chess game played by the computer, which is hard to associate with their own creativity and artistry."

A. Joseph Hoane, one of Deep Blue's programmers, said after the match that there was no question his team could go on and improve the machine, but he wondered aloud whether he wanted to be part of it. "I want my work to be fundamentally useful, and after this I have to be shown that it is," Hoane said. "At this point I have to wonder whether I'd be spending my time doing computer science or whether I'd be spending it improving the way a computer plays chess."