At 12:57 PM 10/9/00 -0400, DNA wrote:
[...]
>So, after all this, what are others’ views on whether a chess
>computer possesses some form of intelligence? Have human intelligent
>agents already created a new form of intelligence that is not biological?
Being an avid chess player I cannot resist answering this one :).
The short answer is that chess playing computer programs are
not intelligent.
I'm not sure whether a program would pass the Turing test
you outlined. I have a feeling it would not given that a
strong player (grandmaster) familiar with how computers
play were the one checking.
But since this is not clear, let me give another experiment
more in the spirit of a Turing test. Here a knowledgeable
chess player gets to ask "questions" where the
questions are board positions with instructions like
"white to move, what's the best move?". The positions
are carefully selected so that they are highly tactical
and intricate but lead to a forced win for white after
8 or 10 moves. Give a sequence of these positions
and then conclude that the computer is the one with
the best score. Oh, to make it clearer you have a time
limit of 5 or 10 minutes per position. To make it even
easier, have the first 3 or 4 moves of the winning variation
be very "odd" (untypical) moves.
Several years ago one the older grandmasters (I want to
say Robert Byrne) dug up one the old masterpieces
played by Morphy or Alekhine or someone similar.
There was a truly brilliant combination in this game
which the author claimed a computer would never find.
Next month he had to eat his words since many readers
wrote to him telling him that their programs found the
winning move in just a few seconds.
This shows that the author really didn't appreciate how it is that
computers play so well. But, if we do understand this, we
can easily construct a Turing test that will find the computer.
I think the problem with your argument is that it is an argument
by analogy and these types of arguments are notoriously weak.
The argument seems to go basically like this. (1) Humans play
chess well because they are intelligent. (2) Therefore it requires
intelligence to play chess well. (3) Computers play chess well.
(4) Therefore computers are intelligent.
The flaw is with statement (2). The problem is that when computers
are playing chess they are not doing anything remotely similar
to what a human is doing. They play chess well for the same reason
that they perform finite element simulations well. They are very fast.
Consider for example that deeper blue can analyze about 200
million positions per second. How could any human possibly
survive even 20 moves against such a monster? The reason
is that humans are very intelligent while the computer is
merely fast :).
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering
The Ohio State University
"One never knows, do one?"
-- Fats Waller
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