Karen Watters Cole wrote:
>
> Brad wrote: There's an interview in Sunday's NYT Magazine with Gary
> Kasparov.
> He criticizes IBM for making such a big thing of Deep Blue beating him in
> 1997, instead of treating it as a scientific experiment.
> I'm sure there is some "sour grapes" in this, and that, had Kasparov won, he
> might not have been so dispassionate about it either, but, nonetheless, I
> think he is basically right that the sun had already set on IBM, which no
> longer was interested in science but only in the bottom line and bullsh-t
> advertising.
> I guess it's a shame that Gasparov doesn't have a chess-playing son, even if
> he didn't have the father's talent, who could challenge Big Blue to a
> rematch and launch a war to finish the job destiny had handed him.
> Karen
Kasparov apparently is not a mathematician. Many years ago,
John von Neumann rather famously said:
Chess is not a game.
By this "Johnny" meant that a sufficiently powerful
computer could play all possible chess games and
find out what the outcome would be for all of them,
so that, when anybody sat down to the chess board,
they would know the best they could do if the opponent
played their best possible game, so there would
be no point in playing the game.
By a game, von Neumann meant a human interaction in
which *bluffing* plays an essential role. These
interactions cannot be computed.
Kasparov's point as I use it, however, goes beyond
this: The only thing computers can't do (besides
having emotions, which we share with dogs even if not
with cats, etc.), is to have an original idea.
The AI-knowledgeable/naive among you may say:
"Not yet!"
OK, I grant you your point, and quote Alan Turing:
"If we ever make a computer that thinks, we shan't
understand how it does it." -- which is what we
already have in the chemical processes of
biological production of thinking beings (I am
ignoring the deep epistemological/ontological issues of the
status of the chemical world, here).
Try to predict a new idea. If you "predict" it, it's
not new. If you don't predict it, it's not
predicted. The logic is, I believe, "air tight".
A new idea must always come from outside
the world-as-such-and-as-a-whole. It's no
more accessible than Kant's "thing in itself".
Either we are places where genuinely extra-worldly
events occur, or else the computers will do it
better. (Again, I am not talking about emotional
life here, esp. "self sacrifice" --> Let he or
she who wishes to become another Simone Weil
be assured that no computer will compete with
him or her. But you all know I am not
an enthusiast for self-sacrifice or for
sacrificing others either.)
If Kasparov has a son, the boy will truly
do better than his father if he comes up with
an *elegant* proof for chess -- not just exhausting the
problem space (which is how I believe the 4-color
map problem was solved), but an insight which,
like Fermat's famous marginal note, was just a little
to big to write in the margin of a single page on the
night before Fermat would be human all too human and
get himself killed in a duel -- why couldn't
Fermat have been more like Plato and have
left the scene before giving society an
opportunity to commit a crime against mathematics?).
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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