MAN VERSUS MACHINE: Battle of Smarts
by Gregorio V. Bituin Jr.
The Featinean publication
People invented machines that made our life comfortable and easy. It made production faster than ever. It reduces human capacity to do a job as well as develop technology for future use. Nowadays, machines and computers do many jobs once done only by humans from secretarial work and financial analysis to world class chess playing. A race to build intelligent machines is also under way.
Science fictions about thinking machines were also filmed, such as Terminators to Robocops. In Terminator, a half-man, half-machine creature goes back from the future to kill a woman whose would-be son will lead the human race against the forces of T-1000 robots for world supremacy. In Terminator 2, a solid metal machine Terminator defended the human race against a liquid metal Terminator made of mercuric alloy. On the other hand Robocop is a futuristic law enforcer which was invented to bring forth poetic justice against the bad elements of society.
Can we say that in the near future, these science fiction movies may come to life? Can machines battle humans for world supremacy in the near future? Scientists are very eager to know the development and technological advancement of the latest machines or computers to be used in industries and other future researches. And one of the best ways to test the intellectual capacity of machines is to play chess against the human intellect. In relation to this, let’s take a look at the man versus machine match between a chess player and a super computer.
Last February (1996), world chess champion Gary Kasparov defeated the IBM-designed super computer Deep Blue with a convincing 4-2 victory in their six-game match. Deep Blue won only once and drawn twice. In these celebrated chess match witnessed by millions of chess fans all over the world, we can say that Kasparov was not after fame and money, but as he said before the match, he will “try to defend the dignity of the human race”. This man versus machine match also marked the 50th anniversary of the first real computer, ENIAC.
Deep Blue was an improved version of Deep Thought which Kasparov defeated in 1989. Deep Thought was developed by five computer science graduates from Carnegie-Mellon University which began in June 1985. Deep Thought ran four processors in parallel and can search over 700,000 positions per second or 100 million positions in three minutes (over ten plies deep). It uses a database of 900 international master and grandmaster games which can evaluate King safety, development, mobility, etc., while employing an important search concept called “singular extensions” to recognize moves which are important to analyze them more deeply.
International Master David Levy experience humiliation in his chess career when he lost all of his four-game exhibition match with Deep Thought. In 1989, Kasparov felt that it was his duty to uphold and defend human intellectual supremacy over machines, so he challenged their best representative, the world chess champion computer program Deep Thought. Kasparov won this two-game match.
During the same year, Feng Hsiung Hsu, the principal designer of Deep Thought, joined the research staff of IBM’s T. J. Watson’s Research Center. He has been involved in the technical and managerial activities in the area of design automation, parallel processing and optimizing compliers. The more improved Deep Thought was given the new name Deep Blue Prototype and officially substituted Deep Blue three days before the match with Kasparov. Deep Blue Prototype was capable of calculating 50 to 100 billion moves in three minutes, equivalent to searching anywhere from 10 to 15 plies deep.
The famous duel between humanity’s best representative and his steel / silicon counterpart was started on February 10, 1996. Kasparov lost the first game and felt it was perhaps the most humiliating defeat he suffered in his entire career. He lost to computers in the past but only in blitz game and not in a real game under championship condition.
Kasparov commented in his first loss that we was surprised why Deep Blue Prototype offered a pawn sacrifice early in the game which he thought would not make such a move. “I could feel, I could smell a new kind of intelligence across the table while I played through the rest of the game as best as I could. I lost. It played beautiful, flawless chess and won easily.”
Kasparov, like the other world champions, bounced back by winning game 2. He drew the next two games and won the rest. Maybe we’ll ask, “Why did Deep Blue Prototype fail to defeat Kasparov and smash him to pieces?”
Elmer Sangalang of Chess Asia magazine found an answer. In his article “Chess - Model of Artificial Intelligence” he wrote: “Kasparov had a keen feeling for position that the machine do not possess. His experience and knowledge in the game allowed him to see much deeper and evaluate a position much better.” He further added, “It is not yet time for machines to conquer human species intellectually, but man’s domination of chess is rapidly drawing to a close.”
In his article, “The Day I Sense a New Kind of Intelligence” which was published in Times Magazine, Kasparov concluded, “After my humiliating loss in the first game, my over-all thrust in the last five games was to avoid giving the computer any concrete goal to calculate toward: if it can’t find a way to win material, attack the King, or fulfill one of its programmed priorities, the computer drifts planlessly and gets into trouble. In the end, that may have been my biggest advantage. I could figure out its priorities and advance my play. It couldn’t do the same to me. So although I think I did see some signs of intelligence, it’s a weird kind. An inefficient, inflexible kind that made me think I have a few years left.”
The human species won another battle of the brains which only prove that we are still smarter than machines. Anyway, let us think this way: Can we save humanity from machines in the near future if there’s going to have a battle for world supremacy, as in the movie Terminator? I am sure we’ll win again!
by Gregorio V. Bituin Jr.
The Featinean publication
People invented machines that made our life comfortable and easy. It made production faster than ever. It reduces human capacity to do a job as well as develop technology for future use. Nowadays, machines and computers do many jobs once done only by humans from secretarial work and financial analysis to world class chess playing. A race to build intelligent machines is also under way.
Science fictions about thinking machines were also filmed, such as Terminators to Robocops. In Terminator, a half-man, half-machine creature goes back from the future to kill a woman whose would-be son will lead the human race against the forces of T-1000 robots for world supremacy. In Terminator 2, a solid metal machine Terminator defended the human race against a liquid metal Terminator made of mercuric alloy. On the other hand Robocop is a futuristic law enforcer which was invented to bring forth poetic justice against the bad elements of society.
Can we say that in the near future, these science fiction movies may come to life? Can machines battle humans for world supremacy in the near future? Scientists are very eager to know the development and technological advancement of the latest machines or computers to be used in industries and other future researches. And one of the best ways to test the intellectual capacity of machines is to play chess against the human intellect. In relation to this, let’s take a look at the man versus machine match between a chess player and a super computer.
Last February (1996), world chess champion Gary Kasparov defeated the IBM-designed super computer Deep Blue with a convincing 4-2 victory in their six-game match. Deep Blue won only once and drawn twice. In these celebrated chess match witnessed by millions of chess fans all over the world, we can say that Kasparov was not after fame and money, but as he said before the match, he will “try to defend the dignity of the human race”. This man versus machine match also marked the 50th anniversary of the first real computer, ENIAC.
Deep Blue was an improved version of Deep Thought which Kasparov defeated in 1989. Deep Thought was developed by five computer science graduates from Carnegie-Mellon University which began in June 1985. Deep Thought ran four processors in parallel and can search over 700,000 positions per second or 100 million positions in three minutes (over ten plies deep). It uses a database of 900 international master and grandmaster games which can evaluate King safety, development, mobility, etc., while employing an important search concept called “singular extensions” to recognize moves which are important to analyze them more deeply.
International Master David Levy experience humiliation in his chess career when he lost all of his four-game exhibition match with Deep Thought. In 1989, Kasparov felt that it was his duty to uphold and defend human intellectual supremacy over machines, so he challenged their best representative, the world chess champion computer program Deep Thought. Kasparov won this two-game match.
During the same year, Feng Hsiung Hsu, the principal designer of Deep Thought, joined the research staff of IBM’s T. J. Watson’s Research Center. He has been involved in the technical and managerial activities in the area of design automation, parallel processing and optimizing compliers. The more improved Deep Thought was given the new name Deep Blue Prototype and officially substituted Deep Blue three days before the match with Kasparov. Deep Blue Prototype was capable of calculating 50 to 100 billion moves in three minutes, equivalent to searching anywhere from 10 to 15 plies deep.
The famous duel between humanity’s best representative and his steel / silicon counterpart was started on February 10, 1996. Kasparov lost the first game and felt it was perhaps the most humiliating defeat he suffered in his entire career. He lost to computers in the past but only in blitz game and not in a real game under championship condition.
Kasparov commented in his first loss that we was surprised why Deep Blue Prototype offered a pawn sacrifice early in the game which he thought would not make such a move. “I could feel, I could smell a new kind of intelligence across the table while I played through the rest of the game as best as I could. I lost. It played beautiful, flawless chess and won easily.”
Kasparov, like the other world champions, bounced back by winning game 2. He drew the next two games and won the rest. Maybe we’ll ask, “Why did Deep Blue Prototype fail to defeat Kasparov and smash him to pieces?”
Elmer Sangalang of Chess Asia magazine found an answer. In his article “Chess - Model of Artificial Intelligence” he wrote: “Kasparov had a keen feeling for position that the machine do not possess. His experience and knowledge in the game allowed him to see much deeper and evaluate a position much better.” He further added, “It is not yet time for machines to conquer human species intellectually, but man’s domination of chess is rapidly drawing to a close.”
In his article, “The Day I Sense a New Kind of Intelligence” which was published in Times Magazine, Kasparov concluded, “After my humiliating loss in the first game, my over-all thrust in the last five games was to avoid giving the computer any concrete goal to calculate toward: if it can’t find a way to win material, attack the King, or fulfill one of its programmed priorities, the computer drifts planlessly and gets into trouble. In the end, that may have been my biggest advantage. I could figure out its priorities and advance my play. It couldn’t do the same to me. So although I think I did see some signs of intelligence, it’s a weird kind. An inefficient, inflexible kind that made me think I have a few years left.”
The human species won another battle of the brains which only prove that we are still smarter than machines. Anyway, let us think this way: Can we save humanity from machines in the near future if there’s going to have a battle for world supremacy, as in the movie Terminator? I am sure we’ll win again!
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