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Subject: Re: Kasparov [HBR interview] : 'IBM committed a crime against science.'

Author: chandler yergin

Date: 19:59:59 04/26/05

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On April 26, 2005 at 10:33:01, José Antônio Fabiano Mendes wrote:

>                   Harvard Business Review, April 2005
>
>Speaking of analytic prowess, what was the significance of your famous matches
>with IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue?
>
>For a start, they were a huge promotion for the game. Nothing made chess more
>popular than the match I won against Deep Blue in 1996 and the match I lost in
>1997. The official Web site got 72 million hits during the six games of the
>second match in New York, which was a higher daily rate than the Atlanta Olympic
>Games Web site got in 1996.
>
>But the matches meant a lot more than that to me. Competing with a computer was
>first and foremost a scientific experiment for me. I thought it was very
>important for society to start communicating with computers, and I knew that
>chess was the only field where man and machine could meet. You can’t do it with
>mathematics or with literature. Chess, however, lies somewhere in between. I
>believed that it would be an ideal playing field for comparing human intuition
>with the brute force of a machine’s calculation.
>
>The yardstick of victory, I think, should be this: If the best human player—on
>his best day, at his peak—can still beat the best machine, then we can say that
>the chess master is superior to the machine. And for now, I believe that chess
>masters like me still have the upper hand. I can beat the machine unless I make
>a fatal unforced error. But when the chess master can no longer defeat the
>machine on his best day, then we will have to take a cold, hard look at issues
>such as artificial intelligence and the relationship between man and machine.
>
>Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone shared the same spirit of experiment. The
>day after the New York match against Deep Blue, the one I lost in 1997, IBM
>stock immediately jumped 2.5% to a ten-year high. It continued to rise
>dramatically for weeks. For some reason, Lou Gerstner did not invite me to the
>next IBM shareholders’ meeting to take a bow! But seriously, I wish that IBM had
>accepted my offer for a tiebreaker. To my mind, IBM actually committed a crime
>against science. By claiming victory so quickly in the man-versus-machine
>contest, the company dissuaded other companies from funding such a complicated
>and valuable project again, and that’s the real tragedy.
>
>             Did it hurt your pride to be beaten by a computer?
>
>No, not at all. Let me explain this by telling you a little anecdote. In 1769,
>the Hungarian engineer Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed a chess-playing
>machine for the amusement of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. It looked like
>a purely mechanical device, shaped like a person. And it played chess very well.
>But the machine was a fake. There was a chess master cleverly hidden inside the
>device who decided all the moves.
>
>In some ways, Deep Blue was also a fake. The machine I played with in 1996 and
>1997 had no history. Records of its past games were better guarded than
>top-secret documents at the Pentagon. And since IBM refused to release printouts
>of earlier games, it was impossible to prepare for the match. I couldn’t feel
>badly about losing because I wasn’t playing on a level playing field.
>
>       What, if anything, did we learn from your contests with Deep Blue?
>
>We learned, of course, that we are very slow compared with the machine, like
>ants compared with a jet. But it’s not just speed. Playing against a chess
>computer means facing something that doesn’t have any nerves; it’s like sitting
>across the table from an IRS agent during a tax audit. Chess between humans and
>computers is very different from chess between only humans. For one thing, human
>players have to cope with a lot of external pressures and distractions: you have
>a family, you write books, you give lectures, you get headaches, you have to
>earn money. There’s a lot of stuff filling up your brain while you’re playing. A
>machine, on the other hand, is completely without distractions. This shows the
>weakness, the shortcomings of the mortal mind, which is a daunting lesson for
>human beings. We just can’t play with the same consistency as a computer. So
>it’s all the more fortunate that we have our intuition to help us play better.

Thank you for Posting this!

It is a far cry from what some of the Anti-Kasparov 'gang' would like us to
believe.
They, are the whiners, cryers, biased, people who cannot accept the Match
for what is was.
An "Exibition" only..
Of course Kasparov played for the money.
What do you think IBM played for?

A Billion dollars worth of PR.



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