10 Years After Big Blue Beat Garry Kasparov

Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.

Comments

Re:the supercomputers advantage...

[Anonymous Coward]

in defense of kasparov, big blue also had help from kasparov's previous competitors to look over and recommend moves for big blue to move, so it wasn't really the machine alone that beat kasparov, he was defeated by a supercomputer and a few of his previous competitors.

Re:the supercomputers advantage...

[Coryoth]

Are you proposing that Kasparov doesn't "tweak" his game play? That he doesn't learn and adapt? No, but if I recall correctly Kasparov was not given the equivalent game history of big blue to learn how it plays. There was a crucial move one of the early games where Kasparov essentially set a trap -- a situation where computers always opt for one move, but a more subtle human player opts for a different strategy. Given the computers play so far, which had conformed exactly to how computers play, Kasparov was fairly confident. But then deep blue went the other way, against anything any other computer would have done, and completely against all expectation. That really threw Kasparov; he thought IBM was cheating since the move deep blue made was so uncharacteristic for a computer (and even for deep blue's play so far). Things quickly went downhill from there because Kasparov really had no idea what he was playing against anymore, while the computer had been trained extensively on his style of play.

As far as I know no explanation for the strange uncharacteristic move was given by IBM, and deep blue didn't make any other startlingly non computer like moves for the rest of the tournament. It's a rather interesting puzzle.

Re:This article would be more relevant if

[msully4321]

I was under the impression that the rules allowed them to do that: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c. 8.html "13. At any time during play, IBM may replace any or all of the computer hardware and/or software being used to play the games" But it's still kind of dirty..