HAL 9000 Playing Chess in 2001

[Musicat]

Originally Posted by Lemur866

Playing chess required thinking, so if a computer could learn to play chess it could be taught to do anything a human being could do.

We might have to define (or redefine) "thinking." A large part of chess playing can be done by following a stored library of moves; the rest can be done by examining and rating potential moves based on rules of advantage. Unless those programs can also pass the Turing Test, none qualify for "thinking."

Although I do agree that may have been the mind-set onceuponatime.

[Elendil's Heir]

Originally Posted by Pine Fresh Scent

...HAL's "Just a moment, just a moment" seems like a small processing hang up, but it's chilling to realize that in that moment he's judged and sentenced the Discovery's crew to death for being a threat to the hidden mission....

That's creepy but fantastic. Love it!

Originally Posted by Bryan Ekers

Something wonderful.

:: golf clap ::

Not directly about HAL, but about meeting Keir Dullea, with some interesting background stuff on filming 2001: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=616628

[Hail Ants]

Originally Posted by Musicat

We might have to define (or redefine) "thinking." A large part of chess playing can be done by following a stored library of moves; the rest can be done by examining and rating potential moves based on rules of advantage. Unless those programs can also pass the Turing Test, none qualify for "thinking."

Although I do agree that may have been the mind-set onceuponatime.

That's the thing, they were wrong back in the 60s predicting that being good at chess would coincide with an overall advance in AI in general. No one imagined the multitude orders of magnitude increases that occurred with computer hardware (even Clarke had HAL using tubes and taking up an entire room!) The successes that machines now have in chess come from bazillion-iterations-deep brute force attacks rather than any 'learning algorithms'. Kinda disappointing, but IBM's Deep Blue chess computer is still essentially just an immensely fast calculator...

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by Hail Ants

That's the thing, they were wrong back in the 60s predicting that being good at chess would coincide with an overall advance in AI in general. No one imagined the multitude orders of magnitude increases that occurred with computer hardware (even Clarke had HAL using tubes and taking up an entire room!) The successes that machines now have in chess come from bazillion-iterations-deep brute force attacks rather than any 'learning algorithms'. Kinda disappointing, but IBM's Deep Blue chess computer is still essentially just an immensely fast calculator...

IIRC Deep Blue had special purpose chess hardware also, not that difficult to design. I know Belle did.

ETA: BTW, what did you think of his analysis? I think the guy is a bit wacked out, though he did see some interesting errors in the movie.

[Fiddle Peghead]

Originally Posted by Švejk

I remember my dad had a chess computer - an actual computerized board with actual pieces, that would blink to indicate its move - which would have been in the middle to late 1980s, if not earlier than that, so it definitely followed pretty quickly on the movie.

We had one around that time that also used blinking lights. Each row/column had a light and two would blink to indicate the piece to be moved. Each square on the board had a tiny hole in the center, and each piece had a pin that would go in the hole. You had to press the piece down slightly, which would be detected underneath the board somehow. Then another set of two lights would blink to indicate where the piece was to be moved. To move your own piece, you would also have to press it down before moving, and also after, so the computer would know where the piece was placed.