The Coming War Between Man and Machine
2007-08-02 11:01:09
By:
Gene Bromberg
If you've ever seen James Cameron's documentary
The Terminator or the Wachowski Brothers exposé
The Matrix you know that a genocidal conflict between Man and Machine is inevitable. And if you think that
The Terminator and
The Matrix were merely kickass summer action flicks, then you are already totally screwed.
My paranoid rantings aside, men have been pitting themselves against machines for centuries. The folk hero John Henry was a steel-drivin' man who bested a steam-powered hammer—and his victory cost him his life. Once upon a time men went to war carrying pointed sticks, and it pretty much sucked. But then machines got involved, most notably the rifled musket, the Gatling gun, and breech-loaded artillery, and war started to suck on a truly grand scale.
Don't get me wrong, there are some truly awesome machines that I truly appreciate. The Beermeister, the iPod, and the BMW M5 and all gizmos I have considerable affection for. But every day more and more sophisticated machines appear among us, and they're starting to display abilities that should make us worry that the day is coming when heavily-armored cybernetic killing machines will be knockin' on the door.
Chess is considered the ultimate expression of pure intellectual horsepower. There are more potential moves in a game of chess than there are protons in the Universe (note—I'm not exactly sure about that, but I'm pretty sure I read it somewhere and it was really cool). And so it was more than a little frightening back in 1997 when Garry Kasparov, the undisputed World Champion and a guy considered a Einsteinian freakazoid supergenius, was defeated in a series of games by an IBM computer called Deep Blue. A shaken Kasparov abandoned the deciding game between the two, claiming afterwards that the silent black box displayed reasoning that, to him, seemed "alien".
I remember following that match online and getting the heebie-jeebies when Kasparov lost. At the time the Champ was considered an irresistable force of nature—and Deep Blue handed him his jock. True, the computer could review something like 200 million positions a second…but Kasparov was Russian. Well, Azerbaijani. And that counts for a lot.
Or at least it did, because in the last few weeks there have been two ominous developments in the coming conflict twixt man and machine. In the first, scientists at the University of Alberta have developed an unbeatable checkers-playing computer. Chinook, as they named their machine, has "solved" checkers, proving that if two opponents play perfectly the game will always end in a draw. Chinook was able to accomplish this by examining 500 billion billion different checkers positions. Um, how big a number is 500 billion billion?
It's this big: 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Chinook's calculations started in 1989 and were only recently completed. Yes, this computer spent eighteen years pondering the game of checkers. And you thought you were sick of Limit Hold-Em.
Speaking of LHE, those meddlesome scientists at the University of Alberta were, incredibly, responsible for the OTHER big story in the Carbon vs. Silicon battle. In this case these dangerous braniacs came up with a poker-playing computer they named Polaris and trotted it out in Vancouver during the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. They held the first "Man-Machine Poker Championship" and invited poker pros Phil Laak and Ali Eslami to play for the home team.
Now I know what you're thinking--it's a bit nerve-wracking to think that, with so much on the line, humankind selected Phil Laak as it's representative. But he and Eslami acquitted themselves well--the margin was so slight in the first match that it was declared a draw, and in the second match the hominids won convincingly.
Still, it's a bit disconcerting to know that the scientists are doubtless back in their labs tinkering away.
Poker players, especially those who play online, can't be happy that there are more and more sophisticated computers in development, since it's quite possible that unscrupulous folks using poker "bots" could destroy the integrity of the online game. Online poker rooms already keep a close eye out for bots, and that struggle is likely to intensify in the future.
But maybe, when you look at the big picture, that's a good thing. If computers are more interested in playing $5-10 Limit Hold-Em at UltimateBet than triggering a nuclear war and enslaving humanity...that's a good thing, right? Unless they're sitting at my table and keep raising my continuation bets. That's when I get in the mood to do some kung fu to my laptop.
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