Are human chess players doomed?
Another prediction I made in The Age of Intelligent Machines was that once computers did perform as well or better as humans in chess, we would either think more of computer intelligence, less of human intelligence, or less of chess, and that if history is a guide, the last of these would be the likely outcome. Indeed, that is precisely what happened. Soon after Deep Blue’s victory we began to hear a lot about how chess is really just a simple game of calculating combinations and that the computer victory just demonstrated that it was a better calculator. The reality is slightly more complex. The ability of humans to perform well in chess is clearly not due to our calculating prowess, at which we are in fact rather poor. We use instead a quintessentially human form of judgment. For this type of qualitative judgment, Deep Fritz represents genuine progress over earlier systems. (Incidentally, humans have made no progress in the last five years, with the top human scores remaining just be
