Does Deep Blue use artificial intelligence?
The short answer is No. Earlier computer designs that tried to mimic human thinking haven’t been very good at it. No formula exists for intuition. So Deep Blue’s designers have gone “back to the future”. Deep Blue relies more on computational power and a simpler search and evaluation function. The long answer is No. “Artificial Intelligence” is more successful in science fiction than it is here on earth, and you don’t have to be Isaac Asimov to know why It’s hard to design a machine to mimic a process we don’t understand very well to begin with. How we think is a question without an answer. Deep Blue could never be a HAL-2000 (the prescient, renegade computer in Stanley Kubrik’s “2001”) if it tried. Nor would it occur to Deep Blue to “try”. Its strengths are the strengths of a machine. It has more chess information to work with than any other computer, and all but a few chess masters. It never forgets or gets distracted. And it’s orders of magnitude better at processing the information
