I find it interesting how nobody seems to make Mr. Humman’s arguments about chess, but plenty of people seem to make his arguments concerning ASI.
Now, if I were arguing with Mr. Humman, I’d get him to try to play against stockfish (or to play against me, and cheat using stockfish) to let him know what it really feels like to play against a superior mind. I feel like it would be pretty hard to continue arguing his point about chess after Stockfish punched his lights out for the 5th time in a row (or however long it takes to sink in). As a side-note, I do find it interesting that chess engines were only briefly mentioned here. Nor was a large lookup-table-type chess engine.
Now, it might be that there are no Mr. Hummans (with respect to chess) these days, but I wonder if there ever were any. That is, someone claiming that a machine would never be able to reliably beat a human at chess. Was this a notion that more than a handful of people actually held? Was it shattered by the advent of chess engines or something else?
People used to make that argument about Go because its branching factor made AI programs that worked like chess engines intractable—until someone invented Monte Carlo tree search.
On the evening of the last round, there was some discussion amongst tournament participants about when or whether a computer program might become chess champion of the world. Monroe Newborn, programmer of McGill University’s Ostrich, predicted it could happen within five years. Valvo thought it would be more like ten, and the Spracklens were betting on fifteen years. Thompson thought it would be more than twenty years before a program could be written that would beat all comers, and a few others said it would never happen.
The most widely held view, however, was that a computer program would become world champion by or shortly after the year 2000. Considering both the complexity of the game and the complexity of the human mind, that seems like a remarkably positive outlook on the future of computing.
Question: Two top grandmasters have gone down to chess computers: Portisch against “Leonardo” and Larsen against “Deep Thought”. It is well known that you have strong views on this subject. Will a computer be world champion, one day?
Kasparov: Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?’
I find it interesting how nobody seems to make Mr. Humman’s arguments about chess, but plenty of people seem to make his arguments concerning ASI.
Now, if I were arguing with Mr. Humman, I’d get him to try to play against stockfish (or to play against me, and cheat using stockfish) to let him know what it really feels like to play against a superior mind. I feel like it would be pretty hard to continue arguing his point about chess after Stockfish punched his lights out for the 5th time in a row (or however long it takes to sink in). As a side-note, I do find it interesting that chess engines were only briefly mentioned here. Nor was a large lookup-table-type chess engine.
Now, it might be that there are no Mr. Hummans (with respect to chess) these days, but I wonder if there ever were any. That is, someone claiming that a machine would never be able to reliably beat a human at chess. Was this a notion that more than a handful of people actually held? Was it shattered by the advent of chess engines or something else?
People used to make that argument about Go because its branching factor made AI programs that worked like chess engines intractable—until someone invented Monte Carlo tree search.
I found this after a brief Wikipedia rabbit hole: an article from the 1982 North American Computer Chess Championship. https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/softline_1.3.pdf
Garry Kasparov believed as late as 1989 that machines would never completely best humans in chess, and thought he personally would never be beaten by a machine. https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/kasparovinterviews.html
I was able to confirm that directly in the magazine here: https://escaleajeux.fr/?principal=/jeu/js_55?