It was 1997, and Gary Kasparov, the former world number 1 in chess before retiring, was about to play one of the biggest games of his life. IBM had claimed to successfully create a chess engine that could defeat the greatest player in the world. Before this time, chess engines were created, but they weren’t any good at the game. For example, just in the previous year, Gary Kasparov played the same IBM created chess engine called Deep Blue and beat the computer.
Not to spoil the ending, but this year was different. Kasparov would go on to lose to a computer for the first time in his life. In the chess world, this was big. They played 6 games in their 1997 match and Kasparov went on to win one of those, Deep Blue won two and they drew on the other three, making the final score 3.5 to 2.5 in favor of Deep Blue.
The computer that Kasparov played was a huge box that another person sitting across from him had to input Kasparov’s moves into so that the machine could tell him where it decides to move their piece. Today this technology which developed to be much better over the next few years fits in our smart phones and can be played against online.
Although it was very suspenseful at the time, if a tournament like that were to take place today where current world number 1, Magnus Carlson, played a computer, the computer would win every time. It is just impossible for a person to have better vision in chess than a computer that could process millions of possible moves in the time it takes an average person to process just a few.
As we get more advanced as a society, we are building machines that could beat us in almost everything. Some people see this as being very scary because they think that machines and AI will eventually take over the world, but I doubt that will happen (unless someone programs the machine to take over the word) and see these machines becoming better than people as a useful tool to help us with certain tasks that are either really hard for people to do or just take too much time for a person. At the very least, a chess engine is a useful tool for learning chess in that it can be very helpful when you analyze your games.
What do you think about the match between Kasparov and Deep Blue? Do you think machines and AI will take over the world?
ReplyDeleteHey Issac,
Wow that is crazy! It is very surprising that Kasparov lost to a computer. I am familiar with this chess player and people argue he is one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest of all time. Do you think Magnus Carlson is better than him now? Also, I think as computers continue to advance they will eventually be able to beat virtually all humans, but you never know what could happen in chess.
Magnus Carlsen actually played him when he was a kid and lost, but today, I do think that it would be hard to say who is better. I want to say Magnus Carlsen, but then I have seen some unbelievable ideas from Gary Kasparov in certain games he played so Im just going to have to give the boring answer that I don't know.
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