5/15/2023 0 Comments The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr![]() ![]() In 1770, a brilliant engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a chess-playing automaton at the court of Maria Theresia in Vienna. Newsweek called it "The Brain's Last Stand." As many as 300 million people watched the match on TV, and it inspired almost as many op-eds in things people used to read called "newspapers." Losing to a computer at chess rocked humanity's sense of superiority it heralded the advent of machines that think.īut think on this: It all happened before, more than 200 years ago. The Kasparov-Deep Blue match changed all that. Most readers of Book World can remember a time when machines were stronger and faster than we were, but not smarter. No - wait - that's "Battlestar Galactica." Our conflict against machines has been more pathetic: enslavement by BlackBerrys, iPods, an avalanche of spam, a thicket of PINs we can't remember and patronizing computers that tell us to "listen carefully because our options have changed." Indeed, our options have vanished. Soon after that, computers launched a surprise nuclear attack, and a small remnant of humanity survived only by fleeing into outer space. Eight years after their first match, Deep Blue deep-sixed Kasparov, and we basically lost control of our machines. But while Kasparov gloated, Deep Thought evolved into Deep Blue, a machine capable of evaluating more than 200 million positions a second. In 1989, grandmaster Garry Kasparov beat the electronic pants off IBM's chess-playing computer called Deep Thought. ![]()
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