Garry Kasparov reviews the book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, about the complexities of chess and the history of designing and building computers with the aim of defeating humans. He spends less time on the book than he does reminiscing about the various matches he, himself, has played both alongside and against computers. However, I could read Kasparov writing about that kind of stuff for a long time, I think. After reminding us that there are 10 to the power of 120 possible chess matches (more than the number of atoms in the universe) and revealing that, in the end, raw computing power was able to triumph over humans, he moves into some interesting territory:
With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of "Man vs. Machine" a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.
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