Author: José Antônio Fabiano Mendes
Date: 11:45:43 04/05/05
http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1559988
Computers and chess
Not so smart
Jan 30th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Comparing human and computer chess-players says little about intelligence
THE idea that chess-playing skill is a proxy for machine intelligence is not
new. It goes back as far as 1770, when Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian
inventor, unveiled a wooden, clockwork-powered mannekin at the court of Maria
Theresa, Empress of Austria-Hungary. This machine, known as the Turk because of
its exotic costume, could play chess, moving the pieces with a mechanical arm
and defeating even the best human players. It was, of course, a trick—a hidden
human operator controlled the automaton's movements—but some observers equated
its chess prowess with intelligence.
This notion was revived in the 1950s, when the building of a genuine
chess-playing machine was seen by artificial-intelligence researchers as a
stepping-stone towards a general theory of machine intelligence. Claude Shannon,
a computer scientist, explained why, in an article published in 1950. “The
problem is sharply defined. It is neither so simple as to be trivial or too
difficult for satisfactory solution. And such a machine could be pitted against
a human opponent, giving a clear measure of the machine's ability in this kind
of reasoning.”
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