Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 14:05:34 04/05/05
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On April 05, 2005 at 14:45:43, José Antônio Fabiano Mendes wrote: > 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.” As more and more of the natural world was explained by science, mystery receded and God seemed more and more remote, and the universe more and more mechanical. As milestones of machine intelligence are reached, intelligence seems more and more remote, and the programs achieving the milestones seem more and more mechanical. Conclusion: God and intelligence are explanations for processes not yet understood... By this reasoning, the bar what constitutes genuine AI will continue to be raised every time a significant milestone is achieved. What were formerly regarded as milestones will no longer be valued. Roger
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