Man Still Most Interesting Computer

For those who worry that losing a chess match to a machine somehow diminishes humanity, Deep Blue’s victory over Garry Kasparov last week was easy to explain away.

Deep Blue is a powerful machine, and the outcome of the match was no more surprising than if Kasparov had tried to outrun a train. But if you think again, the whole thing is eerie. One kind of computer, made of neurons, lost to another kind of computer, made of microchips.

It’s not a matter of man versus machine but machine versus machine. At this point, Kasparov is still a much more interesting computer than Deep Blue. He knows when he makes a bad move and displays behavior that other humans interpret as regret. In tense moments, signals are sent to his stomach causing it to secrete acid. Sensory nerves detect the corrosive fluid and send danger signals to his brain. The pain motivates him to focus his attention, make better moves and relieve the suffering. Evolution programmed him that way.

Deep Blue doesn’t have a stomach, and it devotes every bit of its resources to winning the game. But someday there will be a Deeper Blue. Like Kasparov’s brain, it might scrutinize its opponents’ physical behavior for signs of nervousness and scan its own past moves to see which could have been better.

To make sure Deeper Blue doesn’t fritter away too much time on these ancillary activities, programmers might give it the digital equivalent of a stomach - an internal gauge whose reading (call it anxiety) increases when it senses that its opponent pulls ahead. When anxiety is low, Deeper Blue might allow itself the luxury of contemplating long-range strategies or surprise moves.

Artificial anxiety might be the key to making Deeper Blue WANT to win. Its rules about chess could be supplemented with rules about life: that the goal is not just to make the best possible play each turn, but to keep on winning.

For computers and brains to be aware of something they must have an internal model of it - a representation, either digital or neurological. In the recent match, Kasparov kept honing his mental model of Deep Blue, developing a theory of how the machine worked. Deep Blue could not learn on its own; the programmers did the fine-tuning. But there is no reason why the entire representation of Kasparov could not eventually be contained inside Deeper Blue’s memory.

And if Deeper Blue can have a model of Kasparov, then Deepest Blue probably could also have a model of itself. In some books that would count as consciousness. At this point, Kasparov or his great-granddaughter might have a sporting chance again, for they could wage psychological warfare against the computer, just as they would with a human opponent.

And since the machine would now have stooped to its opponent’s level, it would only be fair to give the human player a computer to do fast chess calculations. The game would become interesting again.