From: Sam Sloan BEST COM> Date: 12 may 1997 Subject: Re: Real chess computing You are just being silly. As the programmers frequently pointed out, this victory had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. The computer does not think. It just runs fast. Also, as Kasparov pointed out in his press conference after the match, this match was not played under conditions in which humans play in normal competition. The fact that two grandmasters were sitting in the Deep Blue "War Room" throughout the match analyzing the games as they progressed and the perimeters of the computer could be changed by humans in the middle of the game means that this is not necessarily a true test. Most grandmasters agreed that in a 20 game match under real chess conditions Kasparov and many other grandmasters would easily beat the computer. Regarding a program to play shogi, I myself wrote such a program years ago. A shogi playing computer program would have to function much differently from a chess program. An exhaustive search of the type applied to chess simply would not work in shogi. Go presents even greater problems. There are many programmers working on go playing programs and there is an Internet discussion group about this, but no go playing program has reached the shodan level, nor is any likely to in the near future. Sam Sloan At 11:59 AM 5/12/97 BST, you wrote: >I see that the IBM Deep Blue machine has beaten the world chess champion 3 1/2 >- 2 1/2 in a 6 game series. David Levy (amongst others) was talking about this >on the radio this morning (in the U.K.). I don't know that this is necessarily >the major breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence which it is being touted as? > >Is there any chance that this machine can or will be programmed to play shogi? >I would imagine that the problem of playing shogi (larger board, promotion, >drops) might give Deep Blue a slight headache? After that, we can try it with >Go? > >Should the NSR think about organising a challenge to Deep Blue or am I just >being silly? > >Roger Hare > >