Decision Support Systems For Business Intelligence
    by Vicki L. Sauter

 
 
Modeling Insights: Deep Blue
The acceptance of artificial intelligence has not been universal. Some managers just do not trust the computers to understand all of the interworkings of the choice context. Other managers have concerned about the legal ramifications of a wrong choice.

Still other decision makers just do not believe in the reasoning process of computers. Once example of this disbelief was expressed by Garry Kasparov when he defended his World Chess Champion position against Deep Blue, an IBM computer programmed to play chess. In the first game of the match, the computer made a move that Kasparov judged to be "a wonderful and extremely human move." However, Kasparov had difficulty responding to the move because a computer "would never make such a move." Kasparov judged that although humans regularly see the impact, "a computer can't 'see' the long-term consequences of structural changes in the position or understanding how changes in pawn formations may be good or bad."

In fact, he was so sure that the computer could not reason that he was "stunned" by the move. While he had played chess against many computers before Deep Blue, this move caused him to "feel - I could smell - a new kind of intelligence across the table." Unfortunately for Kasparov, the computer had, in fact, psyched him out with the move and actually won the game.

Kasparov, however, showed that the human's intelligence was still superior because the experience forced him to think of the shortcomings of computers throughout the remainder of the match and use that information strategically in his play development. For example, he changed moves in a well known opening sequence in one game. Since the new opening was not stored in the database, Deep Blue could not find an appropriate plan to respond to it. Neither could Deep Blue reason that Kasparov's change from the well-known sequence was meaningless and respond with a known response. In the end, Kasparov won the tournament in 1996 and kept his title.

However, IBM heavily upgraded Deep Blue to improve its logic. Later in 1997, Deep Blue won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws. Kasparov claimed there was cheating and demanded a rematch, but IBM declined and disassembled Deep Blue.

Deep Blue was a combination of special purpose hardware and software with an IBM RS/6000 SP2 -- a system capable of examining 200 million moves per second, or 50 billion positions, in the three minutes allocated for a single move in a chess game.

Kasparov and Deep Blue

the final position

 

   Page Owner: Professor Sauter (Vicki.Sauter AT umsl.edu)