Just who or what...........whom or how many..............was Garry K playing?..................Garry won the 1st time they met......


Deep Blue played chess in a fundamentally different way than Kasparov did, and while it may have been able to beat him, there are innumerable other things that Kasparov could do that Deep Blue never could—including having an emotional meltdown and then apologize to the press about it later that day. Computers will continue to improve, but the days of Hal shutting the pod-bay doors on us still lie far, far in the future—if they ever even happen at all. Instead, what's more likely is that machine intelligence will work alongside human intelligence, working more as helpful assistant than destroyer of the human race.

As Fei-Fei Li of Stanford puts it, "We have made a lot of progress, but it's important to understand we are closer to a washing machine than a Terminator." 

For more, read Clyde Haberman's esssay over at the NYT, "Smart Robots Make Strides, but There's No Need to Flee Just Yet."