L'homme en échec, suite et fin

The defeat of the chess champion Garry Kasparov by the IBM Deep Blue computer in 1997 has often been described as the defeat of man by a machine. Thierry Libaert has already analysed this event for Futuribles (n° 228, February 1998, pp. 5-15), putting the significance of this victory into perspective. Since then two return matches between man and machine have been played (in 2002 and 2003) and ended in stalemate; Thierry Libaert therefore pursues his reactions to the topic a little further.
He first discusses the distinctive features of these encounters between human beings and machines, and emphasizes that the exponential increase in the calculating power of computers will inevitably lead in the long term to the machine outclassing human beings in this kind of game of strategy. Yet this does not mean the end of the game of chess. On the contrary, he argues, these developments could stimulate human chess players to find a new approach to the game.
He concludes his piece by drawing an analogy between human thought processes and computer calculation, suggesting that the design and technical improvements to chess computers might help in understanding how the human brain works, and that ultimately this might be expressed algebraically.