Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:47:52 05/06/99
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On May 05, 1999 at 15:43:23, Prakash Das wrote: [snip] > No one is casting aspersions (yet) on the respectable Ken Thompson. It's >disingenuos to suggest that.. He may have arbitrated but what he was arbitrating >exactly? The whole operation was financed, staged and managed single-handedly by >IBM only, one arbiter is not enough. When DB was restarted after a crash, I >doubt an arbiter handled himself (or oversaw) the whole startup process.. most >likely he entrusted it to the ibm people. It's very easy to do foul things, IBM >had a big stake. > > Did IBM in fact do that? We don't know for sure. They should be publishing the >entire history of the games (every iota). But they won't do that - it was an >exhibition designed for IBM's benefit. > > Is Deep Blue a weak computer then? Of course not, with it's special purpose >hardware, it's quite a challenging thing. Here's an interesting thought: After any of the crashes and restarts (how many were there?), did Deep Blue suddenly make an astounding strategic move that puzzled Kasparov, or were those moves only during normal move exchange sequences? If the move suggested after a restart was pretty bland, then why should we suspect anything at all? I think the challenges to the integrity of IBM are badly misplaced. The entire Deep Blue experiment did more for chess and chess programming than anything anyone else has done in recent history. Look, we're still talking about it today, and it was two years ago, so it must have been pretty interesting. Anything they could possibly have gained by cheating would be outweighed a billion times by the losses they would suffer if caught cheating. IBM is conservative. There is no way I will ever believe they would do something like that without real, concrete evidence. I don't claim to be impartial. I have genuine, deep-seated admiration for what they did. I also think GK was a spoil-sport afterwards. So maybe I even have an axe to grind. But even with a slanted view, I really, honestly can't imagine some big evil plot behind it all. It's just too absurd.
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