Wow. I think Hofstadter's thoughts (from NYT, 1996) are so way, way off on this:

Several cognitive scientists said Deep Blue's victory in the opening game of the recent match told more about chess than about intelligence.

"It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent," said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and author of several books about human intelligence, including "Godel, Escher, Bach," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, with its witty argument about the connecting threads of intellect in various fields of expression. "They're just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn't. It doesn't mean Kasparov isn't a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings."

Those who ascribe to the theory that machines are just machines that will always be apprenticed to human masters tend to view the hoopla over the chess match and the worry over the ascension of the machine as, well, "crazy," to use the word of Berkeley's Searle.

"It's just a hunk of junk that somebody's designed," he said of Deep Blue.

Paul Saffo, a technology expert at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, Calif., more or less agreed. "People who fear machines don't need to lose any sleep just yet," he said. "To me, the match was interesting as a cultural event. Chess, whereas it's a difficult problem to solve for computer scientists, is just a constrained formal problem. O.K., a computer beat a grandmaster, but computers aren't any smarter than they were the day before. The question I'd ask, now that this Rubicon has been passed, is What's the new arbitrary measure? Maybe it's a computer that plays go," -- the ancient Japanese board game that has yet to be conquered by a machine -- "or a computer that can fill in an IRS form without getting an audit."

Hofstadter has another idea. He says it is not impossible that a machine might one day learn from experiences and feel things as humans do. But in the meantime, that is still what separates us and them.

In "Godel, Escher, Bach" he held chess-playing to be a creative endeavor with the unrestrained threshold of excellence that pertains to arts like musical composition or literature. Now, he says, the computer gains of the last decade have persuaded him that chess is not as lofty an intellectual endeavor as music and writing; they require a soul.

"I think chess is cerebral and intellectual," he said, "but it doesn't have deep emotional qualities to it, mortality, resignation, joy, all the things that music deals with. I'd put poetry and literature up there, too. If music or literature were created at an artistic level by a computer, I would feel this is a terrible thing."

May I counter with a column I wrote on my bridge blog a couple of years ago:

On the role of beauty and regret in bridge.

Does bridge meet art, and if so where?

I was recently reading a review of a book of chess games which was rather dismissive of The Evergreen Game, one of the classically famous games of the Romantic period.

Bridge doesn’t have periods, it doesn’t have famous hands or themes in the way chess does. Aesthetics don’t have the same weight in the bridge player’s mind, as far as I can tell. Coming to bridge from chess where beauty counted for so much – where one had an obligation to be aesthetically pleasing – this came to me as something of a surprise.

One of the things the reviewer had against this particular game (and presumably, therefore, the period) it was its simplicity. It has a famous sacrificial theme with attendant variations. Yet do not simplicity and beauty go hand in hand and do not we bridge players get our pleasure more of the simple moments than the complex ones? If you perform a backwash squeeze with a triple somersault and a forward tuck landing does that really stay with you the way a simple flip of a card onto the table might which is diabolically deceptive and subsequently wins you the hand?

I was wondering if the difference in part between these two scenarios that makes the latter aesthetically important and the former trivial is that the trivial, but complex one, is there for the taking. The cards lie a particular way, therefore…The simple act of deception, however, requires a creative interaction between you and the cards. Even if you don’t think of it the backwash squeeze is still there. But the one card deceptive play is only there because you create it in your mind.

That made me wonder if it affects the nature of regret in bridge. Because if you have an aesthetic duty to the game, then the regret that follows the errant path is really quite profound. You have disappointed the game as you might disappoint God. You have let down so much more than a mere partner or teammate, or a result.

Just so we have a clear understanding of what is meant by regret, I have in mind Gerald Abraham’s distinction between it and sorrow:

“Sorrow emphasises, by reluctant acceptance, the goneness of what has gone. Regret dwells on the persistent reality of what might have been…..The thought that what might have been has, in fact, not been, does not deprive the might have been of reality, in the way that the sorrowful acceptance of some present anguish exorcises the spectres of the past. Regret stays sadly and quietly with the mind; dwelling on unactual realities….

“To many chess players this experience is real – is at once acute and chronic. When the old campaigner Morry was asked by a spectator: ‘What is that player thinking about?’ he replied: ‘He’s not thinking, he’s regretting.’ But the person referred to was living in a real world: the world in which he moved the other Rook; the world in which he did not foolishly capture the Pawn, or foolishly refuse the Pawn, as the case may be….

“[The] chess player does not accept as valid a rigid distinction between the ‘actually is’ and the ‘never was.’ He does not accept, in other words, the unreality of possibility, including the possibilities of the past. To the logician the whole issue is too easy: true or false. It is just untrue to say: ‘I moved the King’s Rook,’ when in fact you moved the Queen’s Rook. And if you say: ‘But what if I feel as if I had moved the King’s Rook?’ he will reply, if he is a modern: ‘From a false proposition, all absurdities follow.’ But the chess player will not be convinced, for he has lived in a dimension of reality which professional philosophers ignore or pretend to ignore. His regrets accompany him in a dimension of thought which even the idealists find hard to recognise….

“Most taking of all words: it might have been. I do not know whether the philosopher Bergson was a chess player…..But if I ever meet Bergson in the shades, I’ll tell him that the chess players of the world know the real meaning of The Reality of Time. I do not refer to Zietnot which is time mechanised and formalised, and only a clog to the creative spirit. I refer to the richness of time, with all its possible dimensions which are the dimensions of possibility.”

To this I add: only a weak and ignorant player could think that chess ‘doesn’t have deep emotional qualities to it, mortality, resignation, joy, all the things that music deals with.’ Whether or not a computer can beat a human at chess will never detract from that. And maybe, if we want to define the intelligent quality which a human has that a machine will never ever have, it is the one Abrahams so poignantly captures of ‘regret.’

Move generator chips, one man's passion, and the road of a poor under-resourced researcher to scramble for parts along the way to build the machine that beat Kasparov. ( )