One Person’s Technology is Another’s Art
Tomorrow in New York, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked chess player will 
play a $1 million, six-game match against a chess program called Deep Junior. Some have called it the ‘Champ vs the chip.” Kasparov still contests his loss to IBM’s Deep Blue citing that he believes that it had human hints. It was also a machine built to play chess as opposed to this new match against a software program designed to play chess. As Wired calls it “the ultimate battle between wetware and software”
Kasparov said that he will try to prove that “the human race isn’t hopeless.” He also believes that this is a fair match since it is “not a corporate thing, each side has no advantage.” Kasparov is the previous world champion and generally regarded as the greatest player in history.Deep Junior hasn't lost to a human in two years.
Today’s New York Times took a different approach to the chess match. In an article entitled “If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist?” by DL McClain, he said “ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they will say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport and the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess might be just a very complex math problem and there is immediate resistance.”
This becomes an issue essentially because of the very different ways that humans and computers play chess. People rely on pattern recognition, stored knowledge, some calculation and that great unquantifiable — intuition. Computers, on the other hand, have a database of chess knowledge but mostly rely on brute force calculation, meaning they sift through millions of positions each second, placing a value on each result. In other words, they play chess the way they attack a large math problem.
According to Kasparov, he believes that chess is art and sport as well as math and science. If there were a clear answer about what chess is, he says, "then the game of chess is over."
11:02:35 AM 
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