Deep Blue's win doesn't mean doom

Computer Life column for 5/17/97 by
Richard Gordon

I think I have an inkling how Garry Kasparov must feel.

He's the Russian Grand Master reputed to be the best chess player in the world. Or, the best carbon-based chess player on the planet since he just lost a six-game match to IBM's Deep Blue computer.

The summer I turned 18, my youngest sister, not-yet-9, asked me to teach her how to play chess. I know how the pieces move, and that's about it. So I taught her, and after four days, she was drawing me consistently and occasionally beating me.

Imagine my delicate teen-aged ego under the circumstances. Family legends do not indicate how I behaved. However, I remember declining to play her after that-no way my baby sister was going to beat me again.

Now, for alleged relaxation I'll sometimes play a freeware version of checkers I downloaded. In man against machine mode, I consistently find myself getting hammered by the program.

I don't let it bother me that my stupid computer and that infernal, even-stupider checkers game can defeat me on a regular basis, so why should Kasparov let it bother him that Big Blue has the resources to develop a computer that can defeat him?

Steven Levy, writing in Newsweek before and after the Kasparov-Deep Blue match, makes it sound like Kasparov's defeat by the computer presages all sorts of major doom and gloom for mankind.

Oh poppycock. IBM poured tons of person-hours into developing a computer that could perform calculations fast enough to examine a couple hundred million chess moves per second. The fact that an enormous corporation can solve a complex problem by throwing millions of dollars worth of resources at it does not presage the fall of western civilization.

Computers actually stupid

There are larger threats to our civilization against which we must guard before we worry about a computer beating Kasparov at chess or me at checkers: aluminum baseball bats, "nite" replacing "night" as an acceptable spelling, red wine being served with flounder or chicken, ice hockey in June, telemarketers calling as dinner is just ready to come out of the microwave, Microsoft declaring itself an independent country and claiming that the western half of Washington state was illegally annexed into the United States.

Computers are actually very stupid things. In real life, none of them can count higher than one or lower than zero. But we humans can artfully assemble enough of those ones and zeros until we have a simple square of color on a screen, a word processed document, an analysis of stock market trends, or even a suggested next move in a chess match against a Grand Master.

Chess is an analytical game. A good chess player considers thousands of possibilities even if looking only a few moves into the future. Computers don't "think"; they compute. And they're fast. So why are we surprised that an industry giant could build a computer that can compute possible outcomes of possible chess moves faster than you or I or Garry Kasparov can think?

Whichever way the match turned out would have been a triumph for human creativity.

If Kasparov had won, we could sing his praises as a creative genius. I'm inclined to do so anyway.

Since Deep Blue won, we can praise the people who made that inanimate hunk of silicon and metal able to compute fast enough that it could compete with the wily Russian.

Deep Blue's victory does not imply that the entire manufacturing sector will become robotized or that computers will replace medical doctors or juries or football teams.

What it does mean is that our best minds can now build a machine capable of computing fast enough that it can simulate a certain kind of abstract analytical thought.

It's almost bedtime. Time to switch from my word processor to a computer game to unwind. To heck with checkers. Plain ol' solitaire with "hints" turned on is about my speed.

Copyright © 1997, The News Journal Company

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