An email from Tim O. this week made me think about the possibility of computers conversing with humans, or rather the impossibility of it, as Turing once proposed it as the ultimate test of the machine intelligence. This in turn made me think about another story that made the news a few years ago (1997) when IBMs Deep Blue computer won a historical match against the (back then) world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine’s moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players, in violation of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games.
After all Deep Blue was a parallel machine composed of 30 x nodes (P2SC) running at 135MHz. Considering the PIC32 runs at 80MHz, how many PIC32 nodes would it take to build a chess machine that can beat a world champion? Or better, show glimpses of intelligence?
Turns out a P2SC processor was much more than a 32-bit microcontroller, comprising up to 15 million transistors, although built in an older technology (0.29um)