Computing, as a science and an industry, has always been intimately connected with games, and with none more so than chess.
The quest to build a computer grandmaster has helped bring focus to computing research since the 1950s and was a major line of inquiry in artificial intelligence. Few advances in hardware came unaccompanied by parallel advances in computer chess; there was a program for IBM mainframes in 1958 and one for $10-million Cray supercomputers by the 1970s. Commercial programs contributed to the demand for the first personal computers in the 1980s.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday September 27, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 50 words Type of Material: Correction
Golden State column -- In some editions Monday, several paragraphs of the Golden State column in the Business section were covered by an advertisement. The full column appears on today's Page C7. The article "Mountain Resorts Look Beyond the Ski Runs," which was similarly cut off, appears online at latimes.com/ski.
So it's not surprising that eight years after IBM's Deep Blue chess computer defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in what was billed as the ultimate test of man vs. machine, experts still debate whether that match is computing's last word on the subject -- and even whether the computer didn't somehow, well, cheat.
The issue has been getting a new airing, thanks to an exhibit installed this month at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Titled "Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess," the exhibit chiefly covers the 50 years of efforts to teach a machine to play a quintessentially human pastime culminating in the Deep Blue-Kasparov match. The museum launched the exhibit with a two-hour panel discussion whose participants' careers spanned the same period.
They were Edward Feigenbaum, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a leading artificial-intelligence expert; John McCarthy, a Stanford emeritus professor who built a machine that defeated a Soviet computer chess team in 1965 ("The Soviets had a better program but a worse computer," he told the audience); David Levy, a British grandmaster who won a series of bets against chess computers in the 1970s and 1980s that inspired programmers to refine their machines; and Murray Campbell, a member of the IBM team that built Deep Blue. (The team disbanded after its victory.)
The role of chess in artificial-intelligence research received special attention from the group. The field's pioneers believed that the knowledge, judgment, learning ability and even psychology of a chess master could be replicated in hardware and software.
Chess appeared to be a well-defined, accessible challenge. "There was a pool of human experts, a rating scale [of players] so you could judge your progress, and it was difficult to solve," Campbell told the museum audience.
