![]() ![]() The dominant part in those days was what we now called good old-fashioned AI, or symbolic AI, which was based less on machine learning. AI was quite different in 1989 and early 1990. What was your role specifically on the Deep Blue team? Still, in spite of all those simplifications you could say chess is an enormously complex game, and that’s why it took us, as a field, 50 years of development to finally beat the world champion. When we look at a game like chess, we say, “Well, yes, of course computers do well because it’s a well-defined game-the rules, the moves, the goals.” And it’s a constrained problem where you know all the information. So it makes sense to use chess as a measuring stick for the development of artificial intelligence. It’s known as a game that requires strategy, foresight, logic-all sorts of qualities that make up human intelligence. Hundreds of millions of people around the world play chess. What is it about chess that makes an especially interesting problem for a computer scientist? ![]() Our feeling was that it was within a few years of being done, although other researchers thought it was still decades away. They wanted to know if there was something special about the very best chess players in the world that was beyond what computers were capable of for the foreseeable future. IBM noticed the successes that we were having building this machine on a shoestring budget and thought it would be interesting to have a group of us join IBM Research to develop the next generation of this machine, called Deep Blue. But as a side project a number of us did develop the machine that became known as Deep Thought, which became the first program to defeat a grand master, a professional level player in a tournament. I was working on artificial intelligence more generally and not exactly on building a high-performance chess computer that could play against a world champion. ![]() ![]() I had had a long interest in computer chess and had even written a chess program as an undergraduate. I was part of a group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University that IBM approached. How did you first get involved in the Deep Blue project? “By the time of our final match in 1997, we had made enough improvements to the system based on our experience that we were able to win.” Scientific American spoke with Campbell about computer scientists’ long obsession with chess, how IBM was able to turn the tables on the reigning chess champ and the challenges that lie ahead for AI. Watson Research Center’s Cognitive Computing organization. That seemingly small victory “was very important to us to show that we were on the right track,” says Deep Blue AI expert Murray Campbell, now a distinguished research staff member in the AI Foundations group within IBM T. The Deep Blue team lost again to Kasparov in 1996 at a tournament in Philadelphia but managed to win one game out of six against the world champ. team’s technology to bring its researchers onboard to develop an early version of Deep Blue-Deep Thought’s successor. This success was short-lived-later that same year, 1989, Kasparov beat Deep Thought handily in the two games. Chess-playing calculators emerged in the late 1970s but it would be another decade before a team of Carnegie Mellon University graduate students built the first computer-called Deep Thought-to beat a grand master in a regular tournament game. The reality of what transpired in the months and years leading up to that fateful match in May 1997, however, was actually more evolutionary than revolutionary-a Rocky Balboa–like rise filled with intellectual sparring matches, painstaking progress and a defeat in Philadelphia that ultimately set the stage for a triumphant rematch.Ĭomputer scientists had for decades viewed chess as a meter stick for artificial intelligence. The supercomputer’s success against an incredulous Garry Kasparov sparked controversy over how a machine had managed to outmaneuver a grand master, and incited accusations-by Kasparov and others-that the company had cheated its way to victory. Twenty years ago IBM’s Deep Blue computer stunned the world by becoming the first machine to beat a reigning world chess champion in a six-game match. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |