> that ``brute force" search may have won this time, but it was not a general strategy, and anyway it was not how people played chess. These researchers wanted methods based on human input to win and were disappointed when they did not.
Mostly tangential to the article but I never really like this argument. Like you're playing a game a specific way and somebody else comes in with a new approach and mops the floor with you and you're going to tell me "they played wrong"? Like no, you were playing wrong the whole time.
No the reason for the disappointment was that early AI pioneers considered chess a model of human intelligence and they expected a chess-playing AI to help them understand how human intelligence works. To have computer chess devolve into a race to beat human champions using techniques that only computers can use clearly defeated this purpose.
Those "early pioneers" were people like Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Donald Michie and John McCarthy, all of whom were chess players themselves and were prone to thinking of computer chess as a window into the inner workings of the human mind. Here's what McCarthy had to say when Deep Blue beat Kasparov:
In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.
Three features of human chess play are required by computer programs when they face harder problems than chess. Two of them were used by early chess programs but were abandoned in substituting computer power for thought.
Then he goes on to discuss those three features of human chess play. It doesn't really matter which they are but it's clear that he is not complaining about anyone "playing wrong", he's complaining about computer chess taking a direction that fails to contribute to a scientific understanding of human, and I would also say machine, intelligence.
Yeah, people get salty when their preconceptions are shattered, especially when they've invested a lot of time/energy in thinking based on the idea that they were sound.
It goes beyond simple sunk cost and into the realm of reality slapping them with a harsh "humans aren't special, grow up", which I think is especially bitter for people who aren't already absurdists or nihilists.
Mostly tangential to the article but I never really like this argument. Like you're playing a game a specific way and somebody else comes in with a new approach and mops the floor with you and you're going to tell me "they played wrong"? Like no, you were playing wrong the whole time.