The Last Chess Game: Computers, Media Events, and the Production of Spectacular Intelligence

Abstract

If you win, you win in one of two ways. Some make their final move, throw “check-mate” in their opponent’s face, laugh. Some say nothing, show nothing, simply sit and watch as the other player discovers just exactly what has happened. Some win the first way, others the second. So, it’s okay to laugh at the loss of another, and it’s okay to show nothing at all, but what you must never do is look pleased with yourself. Because this implies that there might have been some doubt, some question of the other prevailing. —Murray Logan (71)

IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements

“…In particular, chess has long been used to render "intelligent behavior" into a spectacle. As Hamilton (2000) argues, chess contests generate "the effect of spectacular intelligence." This makes chess an obvious means for demonstrating progress toward the eventual (if vague) goal of an "artificial intelligence."…”

Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm

“…By the early 1980s the Cray Blitz had achieved master status; in 1988 the computer Deep Thought became the first computer to defeat a human grandmaster in a tournament; and on 11 May 1997, the IBM Deep Blue computer triumphed over the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, then (and now) the highest rated human player of all time. The dramatic victory of the Deep Blue over Kasparov would seem to represent an incontrovertible validation of the legitimacy of the computer chess approach to AI (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 2008;Hamilton, 2000;Newborn, 2003). The match bore all the hallmarks of what by then had become the standard modus operandi of computer chess research: a carefully staged (and well-publicized) showdown between man and machine; huge cash prizes (US$700,000 for the winner; US$400,000 for second place); and grand claims made about the supposed relationship between chess ability and general intelligence.…”