Deep Blue

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

So you had Deep Blue that built the computer that played and beat Garry Kasparov.

And then you had AlphaGo that beat one of the world's best Go players.

And then so you saw this progression in... metrics of intelligence that said, hey, the machines can solve problems.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union devoted great resources to cultivating chess talent, dominating the championships for the rest of the century.

But the player who would truly upset Russian dominance was not a citizen of another country, but an IBM computer called Deep Blue.

Chess-playing computers had been developed for decades, but Deep Blue's triumph over Garry Kasparov in 1997 was the first time a machine had defeated a sitting champion.

Today, chess software is capable of consistently defeating the best human players.

But just like the game they've mastered, these machines are products of human ingenuity.

poorly.

I remember Deep Blue beating Kasparov.

Whoa! Deep Blue Kasparov, after the move C4, has resigned.

Now we come to Watson.

We're looking for Bram Stoker, and we find...

More impressive was David Cope's Emmy, or Experiment in Musical Intelligence, which he created in 1992.

Dump a bunch of any classical composer into Emmy for reference, and it will spit out some pretty convincing compositions in that style, like this one.

Then, of course, there was Deep Blue, the long-sought realization of the Mechanical Turk beating the world's greatest chess player in 1997.

Wow.

Uh, obviously, uh, you, there's the big thing of what happened in 1997 where IBM's computer Deep Blue played against, uh, Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, and, uh, Deep Blue eventually, uh, won.

Yeah.

Uh, so yeah, it's, uh, it, it has evolved, uh, a lot over the years.

But just because it turned out to be a hoax didn't necessarily mean it had to be.

Was it possible to do what Wolfgang von Kempelen had pretended to do? Could a machine actually play chess? Between the 10th and 17th of February 1996, Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, faced off against Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing supercomputer.

And won, four games to two.

But a year later, an upgraded Deep Blue challenged Kasparov again and beat him.

And he should get $300,000.

Whoa! Deep Blue, Kasparov, after the move C4, has resigned.

It was seen by the media at the time as the birth of artificial intelligence.

But the idea went back much further.

Because there was just so much kind of brute force, uh, in, in, uh, IBM's computer.

I think it was named, uh, Deep Blue.

And I didn't think what was going on inside the machine was very much like what's going on in, in the human mind.

So I've been writing about technology, not only technology, for a very long time.

Okay.

So let me, let me, um, reframe the question slightly because of your answer.

So I start out by saying, okay, big progress in AI and chess, and, you know, m- m- machines can do math, but it doesn't change the world, right? Why does language and coding change the world? Um, and your answer is, well, really, the big difference is between AI that you, uh, that you program, where you're, you're basically just programming a set of instructions, which is what Deep Blue was that beat Garry Kasparov, and something like AlphaZero, which ended up being much better than Deep Blue.

This is the chess engine-