X-Message-Number: 8204
Date: 12 May 97 23:13:54 EDT
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: Deep Blue Emerges

Dear CryoNet:

   Today, IBM's computer "Deep Blue" beat chess grandmaster and
world champion Gary Kasparov, widely regarded as the best human
ever to play the game, in the 6th and final game of their
playoff.  The entire match goes to the computer.  No, this is not
science fiction.

    Perhaps the most interesting part of the duel has been
Kasparov's dark hints that somebody was helping the computer
(yeah, like who?  Kasparov easily and regularly beats all other
grandmasters), and Kasparov's demands to see the computer logs to
ensure that nobody was helping.

    Ergo, Deep Blue has passed a very special kind of the Turing
test here.

    In the previous set of games against the old Deep Blue,
Kasparov said that for the first time he glimpsed something like
a "mind" playing against him.  This week he evidently not only
"glimpsed" a mind, but ran up against one in such shocking terms
that he finds it difficult to believe he was playing a computer. 
The difference was a mere factor of 2 or 3 in speed, and some
extra programming.  Basically, a single year's advance along the
Moore's law curve.

    All of this I find a neat demonstration of the concept of an
"emergent property."  Deep Blue this year is not radically
different than Deep Blue last year-- rather, it is just more of
the same, and faster.  But to Kasparov, a *quantitative* 
difference now manifests itself as a *qualitative* difference.
How can that be?  Where is Deep Blue's "World Champ" circuit? 
That's the sorites paradox.  It isn't anywhere.


                                  Steve Harris

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