The Power of Machines

Dan Dennett has a typically thought-provoking article in Technology Review looking at chess playing machines. One of the machines is IBM’s Deep Blue; the other machine has trillions of moving parts at the molecular level – the brain of Garry Kasparov. Dennett’s argument is that, so far as chess-playing is concerned, the substrates may be very different, but the outcomes of the mechanisms have more in common that many people would like to think. It’s quite amusing how some people want to move the goalposts in order to preserve mystery.  

 

(hat tip to Mind Hacks once again)