Chess
At Bletchley Park, Turing illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess—a useful source of challenging and clearly defined problems against which proposed methods for problem solving could be tested. In principle, a chess-playing computer could play by searching exhaustively through all the available moves, but in practice this is impossible because it would involve examining an astronomically large number of moves. Heuristics are necessary to guide a narrower, more discriminative search. Although Turing experimented with designing chess programs, he had to content himself with theory in the absence of a computer to run his chess program. The first true AI programs had to await the arrival of stored-program electronic digital computers.
In 1945 Turing predicted that computers would one day play very good chess, and just over 50 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer built by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. While Turing’s prediction came true, his expectation that chess programming would contribute to the understanding of how human beings think did not. The huge improvement in computer chess since Turing’s day is attributable to advances in computer engineering rather than advances in AI—Deep Blue’s 256 parallel processors enabled it to examine 200 million possible moves per second and to look ahead as many as 14 turns of play. Many agree with Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who opined that a computer beating a grandmaster at chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weightlifting competition.
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