1993: Will a COMPUTER Defeat GARRY KASPAROV? | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

With his recent victory over Nigel Short, chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov once again cemented his position as the greatest chess player in the world. Indeed, so dominant is Kasparov that some experts now consider that the greatest threat to his supremacy might not be another human player, but a computer.

Carmen Pryce reports from a laboratory outside New York, where a trio of "mediocre chess players" - Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Joseph Hoane - are busy programming a chess-playing machine to beat the imperious Kasparov: Deep Blue. The programmers point to Deep Blue's extraordinary processing speed as its greatest strength, estimating that it can consider over 100,000,000 positions before making a move - more positions than a human could look at in their entire lifetime. Nonetheless, Kasparov himself seems relaxed about the challenge, feeling that human intuition and imagination are more important chess-playing qualities than pure, number-crunching power.

But if Deep Blue does defeat Kasparov next year, what is the next challenge for computers? Kate Bellingham posits that whereas chess is a game that can be tackled using brute computational power, the ancient Chinese game of Go requires far more abstract strategy, and should provide Deep Blue's descendants with a much greater challenge. She interviews Go expert Harold Lee, who feels that computers are still some way off beating the world's best Go players.

Originally broadcast 29 October, 1993.





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