Getting It Wrong

By Stein X. Leikanger

I will never forget the look on Kasparov's face when he lost to Big Blue. He seemed to have looked into a chasm. But his loss didn't distress me. The reason he looked aghast was because he failed. Chess players are not supposed to fail. Chess, for all its elegance and beauty, represents a mode of locked thinking—where the goal is to express an ambition to win, through as few steps as possible. Due to the nature of the game, chess can only produce a win through failure. Actually, the most interesting chess games are the draws—but we're not used to thinking like that, are we? We want to see a decisive outcome—we want to see someone fail.

That's why Kasparov looked as if he had seen his soul burning as he left the chess board. He had failed, and the world had watched him do it—the world had watched him be the one to be defeated by a very clever bean-counting machine.

Kasparov danced among possibilities, sliding, water like, from possibility to possibility, using intuition AND deduction to make his decisions. The reason he lost was due to the mere fact that his opponent was mechanically reliable and fast enough to consider 200 million possible moves every second, while its human adversary was fallible.

When Intel sends a chip out on the market that gets a tenth-position decimal wrong, there's a major cry from potential customers. This is what computers are NOT supposed to do—they are not supposed to get anything wrong.

Humans often get things wrong—sometimes they get things so wrong that it turns into a right. The history of human invention is filled with things that went superbly wrong, to the benefit of us all. Computers are not supposed to do the wrong thing—they are supposed to be obviously right. Which is why they'll never be human, unless they learn how to fail.

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