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Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence,” Campbell told Silver. The irony is that the move had messed with Kasporav’s mind, and there was no one to fix this bug. The machine made a mistake, then they made sure it wouldn’t do it again. The IBM team did tweak the algorithms between games, but part of what they were doing was fixing the bug that resulted in that unexpected move. That strange move was chalked up to these advantages. Because the machine had been heavily modified since he had last played it, he was essentially going in blind.
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Kasparov had no similar record of Big Blue’s performance.
#Who develop deep blue chess game full#
They also had access to the full history of his previous public matches. Deep Blue’s designers had the opportunity to tweak Deep Blue’s programming between matches to adapt to Kasparov’s style and strategy. Many chess masters have long claimed that Kasparov was at a significant disadvantage during the match. But it may have just been a lesson that as humans, we tend to blow things way out of proportion. The revelation was published in a book by statistician and New York Times journalist Nate Silver titled The Signal and the Noise - and promptly highlighted by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post.įor his book, Silver interviewed Murray Campbell, one of the three IBM computer scientists who designed Deep Blue, and Murray told him that the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at random.Īt the time, Deep Blue versus Kasparov was hailed as a seminal moment in the history of computer science - and lamented as a humiliating defeat for the human intellect. “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves,” grandmaster Yasser Seirawan told Wired in 2001, “and it sent Garry into a tizzy.”įifteen years later, one of Big Blue’s designers says the move was the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software. Kasparov and many others thought the move was too sophisticated for a computer, suggesting there had been some sort of human intervention during the game. Either at the end of the first game or the beginning of the second, depending on who’s telling the story, the computer made a sacrifice that seemed to hint at its long-term strategy. Kasparov and other chess masters blamed the defeat on a single move made by the IBM machine. In May 1997, an IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue beat then chess world champion Garry Kasparov, who had once bragged he would never lose to a machine. Wired magazine published an artice asking if there was some hiden reason of Deep Blue beating Kasparov
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