By David Auerbach
When IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 in a six-game chess match, Kasparov came to believe he was facing a machine that could experience human intuition. “The machine refused to move to a position that had a decisive short-term advantage,” Kasparov wrote after the match. It was “showing a very human sense of danger.”¹To Kasparov, Deep Blue seemed to be experiencing the game rather than just crunching numbers.
Just a few years earlier, Kasparov had declared, “No computer will ever beat me.”² When one finally did, his reaction was not just to conclude that the computer was smarter than him, but that it had also become more human. For Kasparov, there was a uniquely human component to chess playing that could not be simulated by a computer.
Kasparov was not sensing real human intuition in Deep Blue; there was no place in its code, constantly observed and managed by a team of IBM engineers, for anything that resembled human thought processes. But if not that, then what? The answer may start with another set of games with an unlikely set of names: Go, Hex, Havannah, and Twixt. All of these have a similar design: Two players take turns placing…
