Author: chandler yergin
Date: 08:32:20 04/26/05
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Other Views... http://www.rc Some Quotes: i.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/NYT_Intro/ChessMatch/MeanChessPlaying.html John R. Searle, a philosophy professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "The Rediscovery of the Mind," (MIT Press, 1992), which argues against the possibility of mechanical thought. "From a purely mathematical point of view," Searle said, "chess is a trivial game because there's perfect information about it. For any given position there's an optimal move; it's solvable. It's not like football or war. It's a great game for us because our minds can't see the solution, but the fact that we will build machines that can do it better than we can is no more important than the fact that we can build pocket calculators that can add and subtract better than we can." Searle scoffed at Friedel's sense that the calculating power of Deep Blue had begun to evince the feel of an intelligent being. "I could say the same thing about my pocket calculator," he said. "In the early days I could outwit it. Divide 10 by 3, then multiply that by 3 again. You wouldn't get 10 again; you'd get 9.999999. Now, they have tricks to solve that. But in order to get human intelligence, you've got to be conscious. Does the computer worry about its next move? Does it worry about whether its wife is bored by the length of the games?" Virtually everyone seems to agree on two things. One is that it is inevitable that a computer will eventually be the world chess champion. The other is that whatever the accomplishment of Deep Blue, the accomplishment of its creators is sublime. ""It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent," said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and author of several books about human intelligence, including "Godel, Escher, Bach," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, with its witty argument about the connecting threads of intellect in various fields of expression. "They're just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn't. It doesn't mean Kasparov isn't a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings." Those who ascribe to the theory that machines are just machines that will always be apprenticed to human masters tend to view the hoopla over the chess match and the worry over the ascension of the machine as, well, "crazy," to use the word of Berkeley's Searle. "It's just a hunk of junk that somebody's designed," he said of Deep Blue. Paul Saffo, a technology expert at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, Calif., more or less agreed.
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