Computer triumphs over human champion.The end came sooner and more abruptly than anyone had expected. In the final game of a six-game match this week in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , world chess champion Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (IPA: [ˈgarʲə ˈkʲɪməvʲə̈ʨ kʌˈsparəf]; Russian: resigned after just 19 moves, giving 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) chess computer Deep Blue the win. It was the first tournament that Kasparov had ever lost to any opponent, human or computer, since he became champion. In last year's bout with Deep Blue, Kasparov won by outmaneuvering the computer and exploiting weaknesses in its play (SN: 2/24/96, p. 119; 3/30/96, p. 200). The Deep Blue team came better prepared for the rematch. "Three things were improved this time around," says Chung-Jen Tan, manager of the Deep Blue computer chess The idea of creating a chess-playing machine dates back to the eighteenth century. Around 1769, the chess playing automaton called The Turk became famous before being exposed as a hoax. project at the IBM 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. "It's more powerful, we added more chess knowledge, and we developed a program to change the parameters [between games]." Deep Blue's calculations allow it to select the best move after evaluating the consequences of different plays far more deeply into a game than a person can. This brute-force capability is particularly useful when the number of pieces left on the board is small and the computer can look even further ahead, having a smaller number of cases to consider. "A computer is very good at solving immediate problems that have definite solutions within three or four moves for each side," says former U.S. chess champion Patrick G. Wolff of Cambridge, Mass. This time, "the programmers were able to give the computer a sensitive enough evaluation function For the string evaluation function, see . An evaluation function, also known as a heuristic evaluation function or static evaluation function, is a function used by game-playing programs to estimate the value or goodness of a position in the minimax and related so it was able to distinguish between certain [chess position] subtleties that before had been out of reach." Nonetheless, the computer's capabilities remain limited. In the pivotal second game, which Deep Blue won, Kasparov overlooked a sequence of moves that would have forced a draw. Interestingly, Deep Blue also failed to detect that sequence. Chess experts later noted that the computer missed several moves earlier in the game that would have assured a quicker victory. In the end, however, it was Kasparov's apparent loss of confidence--a decidedly human weakness--that probably decided the match. "An analysis of the games shows very clearly that cognitively Kasparov is still the better chess player," Wolff says. "What shocked me and most chess players This is a list of chess players. Chess players The people in this list are men and women who are primarily known as chess players, and their biographies are presented in the Wikipedia. who followed the match was how Kasparov simply fell apart at the end. He collapsed psychologically." |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion