>> I remember my father telling me that computers would never be able to outplay humans at chess because they were really just calculators and couldn't think.
The important thing to ask here -and no offence is meant- is who was your father and what did he know about artificial intelligence research and computer chess.
For the record, John McCarthy, who was a guy famously cognizant about both AI research and computer chess, was on the opposite side of your dad and thought that computers would be able to beat humans at chess by 1978 [1]. Come to think of it, many other CS and AI research pioneers, not least Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, had similar expectations, that were only off by a few decades at most.
Then again it's useful to remember what McCarthy had to say when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, finally establishing computer primacy in chess, in 1989. Quoting from an article that McCarthy wrote at the time:
In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have _some_ science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies. [2].
That's because McCarthy, like Turing, and Shannon, and all the other greats of CS and AI research who were interested in chess, were interested in chess as an example of how humans think differently than other animals and computers; not as a sterile fight between man and machine for who can compute the most calculations, the fastest. Unfortunately, the sterile fight is all we ever got.
So maybe the machines "march", but maybe they're not really marching, to were people think they're marching.
The important thing to ask here -and no offence is meant- is who was your father and what did he know about artificial intelligence research and computer chess.
For the record, John McCarthy, who was a guy famously cognizant about both AI research and computer chess, was on the opposite side of your dad and thought that computers would be able to beat humans at chess by 1978 [1]. Come to think of it, many other CS and AI research pioneers, not least Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, had similar expectations, that were only off by a few decades at most.
Then again it's useful to remember what McCarthy had to say when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, finally establishing computer primacy in chess, in 1989. Quoting from an article that McCarthy wrote at the time:
In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have _some_ science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies. [2].
That's because McCarthy, like Turing, and Shannon, and all the other greats of CS and AI research who were interested in chess, were interested in chess as an example of how humans think differently than other animals and computers; not as a sterile fight between man and machine for who can compute the most calculations, the fastest. Unfortunately, the sterile fight is all we ever got.
So maybe the machines "march", but maybe they're not really marching, to were people think they're marching.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_(chess_player)
[2] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html