Humans and machines beat humans or machines at chess
Which are smarter, humans or machines? Back in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer struck a blowfor bots when it beat Garry Kasparov at chess.
Deep Blue won because computers can perform endless lightning-fast calculations; humans can’t. It basically prevailed through brute force, examining millions of possible moves to find the best ones.
That’s not how humans play chess. Grandmasters rely on strategy and intuition honed by years of experience and study to produce an “aha” moment. Human smarts and silicon smarts work in very different ways — which gave Kasparov an intriguing idea. Instead of competing, what if humans and computers worked as a team?
To find out, he created what he called advanced chess, in which players are assisted by off-the-shelf software. Each competitor enters the position of their pieces into a computer and uses the moves that the program recommends to inform their decisionmaking.
At a “freestyle” online tournament in 2005, where any kind of entrant was allowed, such human-machine pairings were absolutely awesome. In fact, the overall winner wasn’t one of the grandmasters or supercomputers; it was a pair of twentysomething amateurs using run-of-the-mill PCs and inexpensive apps.
What gave them the upper hand? They were especially skilled at leveraging the computer’s assistance. They knew better how to enter moves, when to consult the software, and when to ignore its advice. As Kasparov later put it, a weak human with a machine can be better than a strong human with a machine if the weak human has a better process.
The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.
When I become a cyborg I’d much rather play Go