Paris, May 12 (AFP\/APP): With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.<\/p>\n
May 11, 1997 was a watershed for the relationship between man and machine, when the artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved what developers had been promising for decades.<\/p>\n
It was an “incredible” moment, AI expert Philippe Rolet told AFP, even if the enduring technological impact was not so huge.<\/p>\n
“Deep Blue’s victory made people realise that machines could be as strong as humans, even on their territory,” he said.<\/p>\n
Developers at IBM, the US firm that made Deep Blue, were ecstatic with the victory but quickly refocused on the wider significance.<\/p>\n
“This is not about man versus machine. This is really about how we, humans, use technology to solve difficult problems,” said Deep Blue team chief Chung-Jen Tan after the match, listing possible benefits from financial analysis to weather forecasting.<\/p>\n
Even Chung would have struggled to comprehend how central AI has now become — finding applications in almost every field of human existence.
\n“AI has exploded over the last 10 years or so,” UCLA computer science professor Richard Korf told AFP.<\/p>\n
“We’re now doing things that used to be impossible.”<\/p>\n
– ‘One man cracked’ –<\/p>\n
After his defeat, Kasparov, who is still widely regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, was furious.<\/p>\n
He hinted there had been unfair practices, denied he had really lost and concluded that nothing at all had been proved about the power of computers.<\/p>\n
He explained that the match could be seen as “one man, the best player in the world, (who) has cracked under pressure”.<\/p>\n
The computer was beatable, he argued, because it had too many weak points.
\nNowadays, the best computers will always beat even the strongest human chess players.<\/p>\n
AI-powered machines have mastered every game going and now have much bigger worlds to conquer.<\/p>\n
Korf cites notable advances in AI that have helped make self-driving cars a reality.<\/p>\n
Yann LeCun, head of AI research at Meta\/Facebook, told AFP there had been “absolutely incredible progress” in recent years.<\/p>\n
LeCun, one of the founding fathers of modern AI, lists among the achievements of today’s computers an ability “to translate any language into any language in a set of 200 languages” or “to have a single neural network that understands 100 languages”.<\/p>\n
It is a far cry from 1997, when Facebook didn’t even exist.<\/p>\n
– Machines ‘not the danger’ –<\/p>\n
Experts agree that the Kasparov match was important as a symbol but left little in the way of a technical legacy.<\/p>\n
“There was nothing revolutionary in the design of Deep Blue,” said Korf, describing it as an evolution of methods that had been around since the 1950s.<\/p>\n
“It was also a piece of dedicated hardware designed just to play chess.”
\nFacebook, Google and other tech firms have pushed AI in all sorts of other directions.<\/p>\n
They have fuelled increasingly powerful AI machines with unimaginable amounts of data from their users, serving up remorselessly targeted content and advertising and forging trillion-dollar companies in the process.<\/p>\n
AI technology now helps to decide anything from the temperature of a room to the price of vehicle insurance.<\/p>\n
Devices from vacuum cleaners to doorbells come with arrays of sensors to furnish AI systems with data to better target consumers.<\/p>\n
While critics bemoan a loss of privacy, enthusiasts believe AI products just make everyone’s lives easier.<\/p>\n
Despite his painful history with machines, Kasparov is largely unfazed by AI’s increasingly dominant position.<\/p>\n
“There is simply no evidence that machines are threatening us,” he told AFP last year.<\/p>\n
“The real danger comes not from killer robots but from people — because people still have a monopoly on evil.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris, May 12 (AFP\/APP): With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a […]<\/p>\n
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