288 | 27 THE TURING TEST—fROm EVERy ANGlE
Why chess (see Fig. 27.1)? Turing had been thinking about computer chess routines for
some years. In 1945 he said that ‘chess requires intelligence’ and that his planned Automatic
Computing Engine could ‘probably be made to play very good chess’ (see Chapters 25 and 31).^3
In the 1950s the artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers Allen Newell, John Shaw, and Herbert
Simon said:^4
Chess is the intellectual game par excellence . . . If one could devise a successful chess machine,
one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human intellectual endeavor.
Fifty years later, in 1997, Garry Kasparov—the world’s greatest chess player, hailed as the ‘hope
of humanity’—played six games against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. Kasparov said that
‘chess offers a unique field to compare man and machine. It’s our intuition versus the brute force
of calculation’. This match was described at the time as ‘an icon in musings on the meaning and
dignity of human life’.^5
At first the games went as Kasparov had expected. He said that Deep Blue was ‘stupid’—it
‘played like machine . . . It did exactly what everybody expect machine to do’. But then Deep
Blue ‘did something which contradicted any conventional knowledge of the computer’s ability’.
The computer, he said:
played a quiet prophylactic move that ended my hopes, the sort of move no computer had ever
before made. Instead of going for a short-term advantage, it closed in for the kill. Faced with a
losing position and stunned by the godlike quality of the machine’s play, I resigned.
Deep Blue’s unconventional playing (which IBM later attributed to a software bug) led Kasparov
to think that a ‘human player’ was behind Deep Blue’s moves. He said that the computer ‘sank
into deep thinking’ and that ‘when you look at this machine move you don’t think that it’s
figure 27.1 Dietrich Prinz’.
Raymond Kleboe, Picture Post; reprinted
with permission from Getty Images.