Chess champion sinks Deep Blue's figuring.When world chess champion Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (IPA: [ˈgarʲə ˈkʲɪməvʲə̈ʨ kʌˈsparəf]; Russian: faced the chess computer Deep Blue in a six-game match, the contest was not so much man against machine as man against men with machine. By the end of the match, Kasparov Kas·pa·rov , Garry Born 1963. Azerbaijani chess player who became the youngest world champion ever in 1985 after defeating Anatoly Karpov. He beat the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue 4 games to 2 in 1996, but lost a rematch in 1997. had outmaneuvered Deep Blue's developers-Chung-Jen Tan TAN See tax anticipation note (TAN). and his team at the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division. The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 45 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.-to win. But it was a tough battle. "I did not expect that it would be that tough," Kasparov said after the final game of the match, held last week in Philadelphia. In 1989, he defeated Deep Blue's predecessor, Deep Thought, with relative ease (SN: 10/28/89, p. 276). After a stunning loss in his first game against Deep Blue, Kasparov adjusted his playing style to exploit weaknesses in the computer's play, winning the second, fifth, and sixth games and earning ties in the other two. "I think the main distinction between us and computers [is that we] can learn," Kasparov noted. "I learned a lot from game 1 and game 2." In later games, he deliberately created crowded situations that gave the computer few options, limiting its ability to attack his major pieces. In contrast, the IBM team could not adjust Deep Blue's program during the match. Late in the fifth game, for example, the computer's calculations indicated that it had a losing position, and it moved pieces in ways that actually made the situation worse. A human player might have reacted by gambling on a strategy that could trick an opponent into making a mistake. Instead, Deep Blue always assumed that its opponent would play perfectly. The computer lacks a sense of "creative desperation," comments IBM team member A. Joseph Hoane Jr. A number of glitches probably contributed to Deep Blue's defeat. For instance, the team routinely selects the computer's opening moves, but in game 2, the computer failed to play the chosen opening because someone had stored the information in the wrong place. Deep Blue's main strength lies in its ability to select the best possible move after evaluating the consequences of various moves far more deeply into a game than a human player can. The games demonstrated that this brute force (programming) brute force - A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly can go remarkably far in matching human intuition intuition, in philosophy, way of knowing directly; immediate apprehension. The Greeks understood intuition to be the grasp of universal principles by the intelligence (nous), as distinguished from the fleeting impressions of the senses. , experience, and knowledge. "It's a really exciting experiment," Kasparov says. "I'm looking forward to future challenges." |
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