Expert: George Moustris - 10/15/2007

Question
Deep Blue of IBM defeated the world chess champion, Gary Kasporov, in 1997. If computers cannot think, how is such a defeat possible?
Also tell me about some recent information about machine playing against humans.

Answer
Hi kiran,

your question is rather ambiguous because you do not clearly define what the word "think" means. Computers perform calculations which can be regarded a form of thought (actually there is a hypothesis that human thinking is just calculations as well). So, computers DO think. The problem is the scope of applications. In limited environments, with strictly formulated possible actions (just like chess), computers outperform humans. More formally, computers can act on a "formal system" with great ease and more efficiently than humans.
However, they do not perform as well in complex, dynamic, rapidly changing environments (e.g. the "real world"), because they cannot easily formalize it and understand it.
If you want further information, i suggest you read about formal systems and AI, which describe a more detailed answer to your question.

Best
G.