Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Man and Machine?
An anonymous reader asks: "Today Garry Kasparov's last of 4 chess matches with the computer X3D Fritz ended in a draw. The totals of all 4 games leave the two opponents tied 2 to 2, revealing that even though the technology has advanced significantly since Kasparov was beaten by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the odds are not always on the side of brute computational power. This leads me to pose the question: is chess really a viable way to test whether man or machine is truly superior? Until AI becomes flexible enough to challenge us in arenas like art and music, what would be a better real-life competition?"
I'm sure someone will mention Go, just because it's always said that it's much harder to get a computer to do. But I don't see the point of playing games against computers anyway, what does it really prove? It proves that the data fed in to it (from hundreds of sources) and the (several) programmers are better at logically defeating a game than ONE person is. I'm amazed he won two games, this says far more about him than it does about anything else.
What exactly are these contests trying to prove anyway? When the computers gain a clear victory over the humans, what have we learned?