Rhetorical Analysis Paper
9 February, 2010
Human Creativity versus Artificial Intelligence
When I first saw the title of this article “The Chess Master and the Computer”, I could immediately sense what Garry Kasparov’s point was going to be. It seems as if for many of these past decades, many articles are being published around this very subject “Man vs. Machine” and how quickly machine is beginning to exceed our performances in all kinds of activities. This one I found interesting because it deals with Chess and I myself love chess, and have known how to play it since an early age when my father taught me back when we lived in Florida. It is an intellectual sport which requires a lot of creativity and great critical thinking in order to succeed at, so learning about Kasparov’s experience playing with machines I knew would be interesting, especially since Kasparov is a Grand Master chess player.
Kasparov begins the article by describing the efforts of big name companies trying to compete in making the best program capable of beating any human chess player, including the best chess player in the world. Kasparov goes on to tell about how he defeated countless numbers of these programs but then finally lost to a program named Deep Blue by IBM in 1997, after a rematch which sparked many headlines around the world. Kasparov concludes his introduction basically by saying that even though the companies succeeded in building a program that could beat the world’s chess champion, they failed their main purpose which was to build a program that can best imitate the human mind where creativity and intuition triumph, and instead built a program that uses math and formulas in order to win. Kasparov makes it clear that the only thing these companies really did was degrade the art that is chess, which I completely think is true. Chess is a strategic game that is supposed to show who can outsmart the other, and a game of risk and creativity, and the computer programs...