Analysis Of Kasparov's Smarter Than You Think

Smarter than you think. Who’s smarter at chess - computers or humans? Chess is all about ultimate way of thinking, which puts it on a same level as an extreme sport.In the eighteenth century, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir with his clockwork Mechanical Turk—an automaton that played an eerily good game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte.CLIVE THOMPSON is a freelance journalist and blogger who writes for the New York Times Magazine and Wired.He blogs at collisiondetection.net. This essay is adapted from his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013). A writer for Scientific American fretted that the inventor "Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind." Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual

In June 1998, Kasparov played the first public game of 10 human-computer collaborative chess, which he dubbed "advanced chess," against Veselin Topalov, a top-rated grand master.It was, he realized, like learning to be a race-car driver: He had to learn how to drive the computer, as it were—developing a split- second sense of which strategy to enter into the computer for assessment, when to stop an unpromising line of inquiry, and when to accept or ignore the computer's advice.The computer would bring the lightning-fast—if uncreative—ability to analyze zillions of moves, while the human would bring intuition and insight, the ability to read opponents and psych them out.Each used a regular computer with off-the-shelf chess software and databases of hundreds of thousands of chess games, including some of the best ever played. It consisted of two young New England men, Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen (who were comparative amateurs, with chess rankings down around 1,400 to