"Watson Still Can't Think"

Hubert Dreyfus himself contributes to the discussion on Stanley Fish's blog at the New York Times. The philosopher who famously marked the limits of artificial intelligence forty years ago observes that computers still lag humans in understanding contexts.

And human beginners are capable of understanding the position below (recycled yet again!) far better than the best chess computer programs.

Here's another example from the 2006 World Computer Championship: check out Black's horrible 71st move, a move that no human master would ever allow.

Jeopardy, Fischer, anthropology, phone-a-friend

Random links....

Stanley Fish discusses Hubert Dreyfus's critique of AI.  And Kasparov opines...

White to play

Can you evaluate this position more accurately than Rybka?

If so, why?

Sevan Muradian told me that Robert R. Desjarlais's Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard looks like interesting reading.

Garry Kasparov reviews Frank Brady's Endgame.  Mig discusses that review, too.


And guess who was on the Georgian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

not directly about chess....

...but chess players who have experienced the amazing capacities and surprising limitations of chess engines can probably relate to IBM's Watson project better than most of the general public.

I've lived in Chicago all my adult life, and I'd always assumed that Midway Airport was named after the Midway Plaisance.  Oops!

P.S.  Others are seeing the relevance to chess, too: here, Kasparov is invoked to argue for human-cylon collaboration.