Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 12:30:39 01/30/03
Go up one level in this thread
The article is okay. I would like to bring up a point for discussion though. At one end of the continuum, you have the steam shovel. You take a mindless task involving moving stuff from point A to point B, and build a machine that can do it. When this was originally proposed, it was considered some threat to our humanity. Lots of people made their living moving stuff from point A to point B. But after machines made it much easier to do this, these people were displaced and had to display their humanity elsewhere. Humanity was removed from the process of moving stuff from point A to point B. There are still plenty of things, the pursuit of which we feel defines us. The creation of art, blah blah. I won't go into details since everyone knows what I mean. Chess is considered by many to be a sort of fine art. It is considered to be one of those things that that "humanity" does. The problem is that it is possible to devise a mechanical process that does it acceptably well. So the Economist says, well, maybe it didn't take humanity to do it. I think that's a bit much. Allow the humanity to remain in chess, but give the program some credit for having some humanity itself. Enjoy the fascinating convergence of the human and the mechanical, rather than leaving the game to the machines, or disqualifying them from playing. bruce
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