Will the machine always win? The wet brain inside me has been begging to ask a question. What does Blue's blast mean? While the match temporarily placed chess in a rare location -- the front pages -- the victory could "make the game far less interesting."

That's the concern of Langdon Winner, a professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Winner analyzes the culture of technology for Technology Review. He says, "The spread of the belief that 'the machine always wins' could mean that the game will fade in appeal for the next generation of potential human players, and chess players could go the way of elevator operators and bank clerks."

Will there be a rematch? Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. © 1997, GM Gabriel Schwartzman's Chess Camera, courtesy IBM.

Or maybe not. After all, Homo sapiens didn't abandon foot racing just because we couldn't keep pace with cars -- we just gave cars their own races. And in fact, computers began playing chess against each other decades ago. Public fascination with brooding figures staring at chessboards has helped make chessplaying a surrogate for human intelligence. And that helped bias the contest between machine intelligence and human brains. Even back in the 1950s, says Winner, those who thought that grandmasters beating computers at chess "was a sign of the superiority of the human intellect and human spirit were woefully mistaken. Chess is a game with a limited number of pieces and a finite number of rules, and there comes a point where calculations finally win out." That wet brain is pestering me again. It's saying that the glass is half full -- that the victory is testimony to the amazing power of Kasparov's human brain to match a computer running 512 fast processors and stuffed with decades of chess experience courtesy of the programmers and grandmasters who worked on it. Doesn't the long struggle tell us more about the strengths of humans than of computers? If we are so dumb, why does it take such a phenomenal computer to beat us? In looking at the future of our uneasy relation with the computer, Winner recalls a prediction by Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of "Computer Power and Human Reason..." (see the bibliography). Weizenbaum holds that if you specify a task a computer might possibly do, if it's precisely specified and narrowly defined, "chances are a computer will eventually be able to do it." What realm? Given that prospect, Winner says the question is not whether a computer will be able to do complex jobs, like translating languages or winning chess, "but what kind of things we feel comfortable in turning over to a computer -- with their narrowly focused computational mode -- and what kind of judgments, activities, and relationships do we want to remain fully in the human domain?" To read Winner's reaction to the first match, see "It Plays Like God" in the bibliography. Winner also worries that Deep Blue's victory will glorify computers. "The symbolic value of Deep Blue's victory could have unfortunate consequences" by promoting the idea that computers are applicable in areas where complex judgments, even wisdom, are required. He wonders if computers will be overused in education, where the mantra of "connecting every school to the Internet" has been accepted as a national goal without much testing or rational thought. Re: Rematch For his part, Kasparov has stopped muttering that some invisible hand was tampering with the machine, and begun asking to slug it out once more with Big Blue's electronic brain. While the two sides discuss a rematch, let's get to the last, and perhaps most nettlesome question: Did Deep Blue "dethrone" humanity from a position as the supremely intelligent being? Although IBM prefers that this question not arise, artificial intelligence folks say the grand grandmasterly defeat represents inevitability. "If you have enough processing power in a machine, certain tasks that we have tended to think that only humans can do come within range of computer solution," says artificial intelligence adept David Waltz. "This is a story that will be repeated frequently in other realms. If you say that something will forever remain only the province of people, you will be disappointed." Wanna process more information?

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