Mark Ciccarello

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• March 10, 2011, on Watson and the Turing Test:

  I disagree that chess was declared uninteresting only after Kasparov was beaten. The fact is that the brute-force algorithms used, which amount to nothing more than a sophisticated depth-first tree search, have always been uninteresting to AI researchers. We've known for some time that computers search trees fairly well. I remember a CS classmate of mine in the early 1980's who wanted to write one as a term project. The professor rolled her eyes and told him to get a real project. Deep Blue may have been an achievement in terms of parallel computer architecture, but it wasn't AI at all. The algorithms used don't mimic what humans do in any way. Humans don't evaluate billions of possible board positions to come up with a move. They somehow manage to subconsciously prune that enormous tree down to a handful of possibilities that are consciously analyzed. Deep Blue sheds no light on how they do it.