Chips vs. the chess masters
Five years after a historic defeat, humans may be poised for a comeback
But can software alone make up for the power gap? Press releases touting this week's match boast that Fritz has beaten both Kasparov and Deep Blue. The win over Kasparov came, however, in a superfast kind of chess, where computers have a decided edge. And Fritz didn't really beat Deep Blue--it beat an early version of its software running on slower hardware.
Robert Hyatt at the University of Alabama doubts that Deep Blue has been bested. He wrote a program for a Cray supercomputer that, in the 1980s, defeated every other machine until Deep Blue's predecessor, Deep Thought, came along. And Deep Blue was up to 100 times faster. "Once you've been run over by a freight train, you know it's real painful," says Hyatt. "But until you do, you can only imagine."
Imagine is truly all anyone can do. Deep Blue played against Kasparov and then disappeared, dismantled after negotiations for a rematch with Kasparov fell apart. "At the end of the day, IBM's business is not in the chess computing software business," says My Luu, a public relations manager at IBM.
Singing the blues. But Deep Blue's untimely demise has left a hole at the center of this field. "Of all the things that have really hurt computer chess," says Hyatt, "that has hurt." Frederic Friedel, head of Chessbase, the company that created Deep Fritz, says it's as if scientists went to Mars and, instead of exploring, simply headed back home.
Victories by Deep Fritz and Deep Junior could dispel any doubts that computers have the upper hand. But most experts predict Kramnik and Kasparov will win easily if they play their best. Some critics say the software makers and the grandmasters are both hyping the programs' prowess and predict the match will prove more useful for selling software than advancing science. Kramnik, however, says he used Fritz to analyze the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov games and found Fritz suggested much better moves. "It's simply a stronger program," he says. "So I know it's going to be an even more serious challenge."
Yet a human victory will only postpone the inevitable. Already, the top humans can't beat a computer in checkers, and chess will go the same way. That's because chess, at its core, is a game of complex mathematics. While software gets better and runs faster every year, the human brain, well, doesn't. "We're at a balance point," says McGill's Newborn. "But the pendulum is flipping in the other direction, and it won't come back."
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