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most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they will say
unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport and
the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess might be
just a very complex math problem and there is immediate
resistance.
The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow in
New York, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked player and
the former world champion, will play a $1 million, six-game
match against a chess program called Deep Junior. It will be
the fourth time that Mr. Kasparov has matched wits against a
computer and the first time since he lost a similar match in
1997 to Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by I.B.M. Recently, Vladimir
Kramnik, Mr. Kasparov's former protégé and the current world
champion, tied an eight-game match against another chess
playing program called Deep Fritz.
Whether Mr. Kasparov wins or loses, clearly chess computers
have reached a point where they can compete against, and
sometimes beat, the world's best players. Even Mr. Kasparov,
always reluctant to acknowledge that anyone or anything might
be superior to him over a chess board, admits that the point
at which computers consistently play better than humans is
probably not that far off.
But if computers become better than humans at chess, does
that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess is
essentially a complicated puzzle?
The question arises partly because of the very different
ways that humans and computers play chess. People rely on
pattern recognition, stored knowledge, some calculation and
that great unquantifiable — intuition. Computers, on the other
hand, have a database of chess knowledge but mostly rely on
brute force calculation, meaning they sift through millions of
positions each second, placing a value on each result. In
other words, they play chess the way they attack a large math
problem.
Chess is not the only field where computers have achieved
success formerly thought to be achievable only through human
creativity. In 1997, six months after the victory by Deep
Blue, a competition was held at Stanford University between a
human and a computer to see which could compose music in the
style of Bach. The computer won. Monty Newborn, a professor of
computer science at McGill University in Montreal who has just
published a book called "Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence
Milestone," thinks that the question of what chess is is
fairly clear. "There is no question that it is a puzzle," he
said. "Some people like to imagine that it is an art
form."
But if that were the case, some chess players reply, then
why are so many people who play chess well not good at math?
David Goodman, an international master, said that chess
players come from many backgrounds with different skills. "In
international tournaments, it's true, I've played a
grandmaster who became a math professor at 23. But there are
others who were writers and lawyers and even one who played
soccer on Norway's national team," Mr. Goodman said.
Others do not see the implications for computer supremacy
in chess in black-and-white terms. Murray Campbell, a
developer of Deep Blue who still works at I.B.M., said that
Deep Blue's designers had adopted a scientific and an
engineering approach when building the computer, but that the
results could be viewed as artistic, regardless of what
produced them.
"The question reminds me of the question that often gets
asked in artificial intelligence," he said. "Is the system
intelligent? It is because it produces intelligent behavior.
If it does something artistic, then it is artistic. It does
not matter how it did it."
Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the
University of Alberta who created Chinook, the best checkers
playing entity in the world, thinks that checkers and chess
are art and sport, regardless of how well computers play them.
"As a competitive chess player in my younger days, when I
played a beautiful game, I wanted to frame it and put it on
the wall," Mr. Schaeffer said. "Chess is also a sport because
it is incredibly mentally and physically demanding. That
computers play it better does not lessen any of the enjoyment
that we can get from the game."
For his part, Mr. Kasparov thinks that chess is art and
sport as well as math and science. If there were a clear
answer about what chess is, he says, "then the game of chess
is over."
Mr. Campbell of I.B.M. worries that chess could be
relegated to the realm of a complex math problem if computers
ever "solve" the game — figure out all the possibilities and
know the result regardless of what moves are played. For now,
while computers have managed to solve all endgames where there
are six or fewer pieces on the board, it does not seem
possible that they will be able to solve the entire game given
that the number of chess moves in an average game is estimated
to be about 10 to the 40th power. That number is so large, it
would take the most powerful computers billions of years to
calculate it.
But, Mr. Campbell said, if computers do ever solve chess it
would ruin it artistically. Already, he said, those endgames
that computers have solved sometimes take so many moves that
the ideas behind them are at times hard to follow. "That is
not beautiful," he said. "It is just
incomprehensible."