Arona wrote:
With all due respect: a machine will never be 'better' than a human chess
player. It's not just about winning it. It's about enjoying it...
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> ...Deep Blue's feat cannot be compared to cognition; it
> > was an autonomic process that happened to play chess....
>
> Robert J. Bradbury wrote: Eliezer, if what you say is accurate, then I
> don't believe that much of what I do, such as selecting a line of code in a
> program,
> driving a car or even talking would not be "cognition" either.
> [And I'm deeply saddened by that... :-;]...
Deep Blue's feat, along with the general progress of chess computing throughout the last 2 decades deeply changed the way chess players view the act of playing chess. It is interesting in retrospect to read Bobby Fischer's comments about computer chess. As far back as the mid 70s, he warned: the computers are coming. They will be strong opponents, even for grandmasters. He was ridiculed at the time, but of course he was right.
Now chess players have come to realize that their brains are running an algorithm of some kind; perhaps not well understood, but still an algorithm. Today chess players in general will tend to be very comfortable with the notion that computers will eventually [probably soon] be able to do things that we think of as exclusively human, such as driving cars, recognizing a face in a crowd, developing software, writing poetry and music, and even playing chess *and enjoying it*. spike