Following up the earlier post about computers and consciousness, here’s an excerpt from “Yes, Computers Can Think,” a 1997 New York Times article by Drew McDermott written in the wake of the machines conquering Kasparov:

“When people say that human grandmasters do not examine 200 million move sequences per second, as the computer does, I ask them, ‘How do you know?’ The answer is usually that human grandmasters are not aware of considering so many options. But humans are unaware of almost everything that goes on in our minds.

I tend to agree that grandmasters search in a different way than Deep Blue does, but whatever method they use, if done by a computer, would seem equally ‘blind.’

For example, some scientists believe that the masters’ skill comes from an ability to compare their current position against, say, 10,000 positions they’ve studied. We call their behavior insightful because they are unaware of the details; the right position among the 10,000 ‘just occurs to them.’ If a computer did the same thing, the trick would be revealed; we could examine its data to see how laboriously it checks the 10,000 positions. Still, if the unconscious version yields intelligent results, and the explicit algorithmic version yields essentially the same results, are not both methods intelligent?

So what shall we say about Deep Blue? How about: It’s a ‘little bit’ intelligent. Yes, its computations differ in detail from a human grandmaster’s. But then, human grandmasters differ from one another in many ways.

A log of the machine’s computations is perfectly intelligible to chess masters; they speak the same language, as it were. That’s why the I.B.M. team refused to give the game logs to Mr. Kasparov during the match: It would have been the same as bugging the hotel room where the computer ‘discussed’ strategy with his seconds.

Saying that Deep Blue doesn’t really think is like saying an airplane doesn’t really fly because it doesn’t flap its wings.

Of course, this advance in artificial intelligence does not indicate that any Grand Unified Theory of Thought is on the horizon. As the field has matured, it has focused more and more on incremental progress, while worrying less and less about some magic solution to all the problems of intelligence. There are fascinating questions about why we are unaware of so much that goes on in our brains, and why our awareness is the way it is. But we can answer a lot of questions about thinking before we need to answer questions about awareness.

It is entirely possible that computers will come to seem alive before they come to seem intelligent. The kind of computing power that fuels Deep Blue will also lead to improved sensors, wheels and grippers that will allow machines to react in a more sophisticated way to things in their environment, including us. They won’t seem intelligent, but we may think of them as a weird kind of animal — one that can play a very good game of chess.”