![]() It took only a few decades after Shannon wrote his paper for engineers to build a computer that could play chess brilliantly. In a 1958 paper, the prominent AI researchers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell declared that computers are “machines that think” and, in the near future, “the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.” With the right programming, a computer would turn sapient. Not only would the machine play chess like a master, but it would also be able to do pretty much anything else that a human brain can do. Through a curious kind of circular logic, this analogy in turn guided the early pursuit of artificial intelligence: if you could figure out the codes that the brain uses in carrying out cognitive tasks, you’d be able to program similar codes into a computer. Many scientists and philosophers came to assume that the brain must work something like a digital computer, using its billions of networked neurons to calculate thoughts and perceptions. Fascination with digital computers intensified during the 1950s, and the so-called “thinking machines” began to influence theories about the human mind. Type B, the intelligence strategy, seemed far more feasible, not least because it fit the scientific zeitgeist. “Unfortunately,” Shannon concluded, “a machine operating according to the Type A strategy would be both slow and a weak player.” As Kasparov points out, there are “over 300 billion possible ways to play just the first four moves in a game of chess, and even if 95 percent of these variations are terrible, a Type A program would still have to check them all.” In 1950, and for many years afterward, no one could imagine a computer able to execute a successful brute-force strategy against a good player. It seemed obvious that, under the time restrictions of a competitive chess game, a computer would never be fast enough to extend its analysis more than a few turns ahead. When Shannon wrote his paper, he and everyone else assumed that the Type A method was a dead end. In essence, a Type B computer would demonstrate the intuition of an experienced human player. “Type B” would use intelligence rather than raw power, imbuing the computer with an understanding of the game that would allow it to focus on a small number of attractive moves while ignoring the rest. ![]() “Type A” would rely on brute force, calculating the relative value of all possible moves as far ahead in the game as the speed of the computer allowed. He laid out two very different approaches to programming the function. A chess program, he wrote, would need to incorporate a search function able to identify possible moves and rank them according to how they influenced the course of the game. It would force the human race “either to admit the possibility of a mechanized thinking or to further restrict concept of ‘thinking.’” He went on to offer an insight that would prove essential both to the development of chess software and to the pursuit of artificial intelligence in general. It reflected a series of misperceptions - about chess, about computers, and about the mind.Īt the dawn of the computer age, in 1950, the influential Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon published a paper in Philosophical Magazine called “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.” The creation of a “tolerably good” computerized chess player, he argued, was not only possible but would also have metaphysical consequences. But, as the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov argues in his illuminating new memoir Deep Thinking, the theory was flawed from the start. It was a compelling theory, and to this day it shapes public perceptions of artificial intelligence. To build a machine able to beat a skilled human player would be to fabricate a mind. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that when computer scientists began to contemplate the creation of an artificial intelligence in the middle years of the last century, they adopted the chessboard as their proving ground. Staring at the pieces, lost to the world, the chess master seems a figure of pure thought: brain without body. ![]() For hundreds of years, it has served as standard and symbol for the pinnacles of human intelligence. CHESS IS THE GAME not just of kings but of geniuses.
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