Eighteen years ago today, on May 10, 1997, an IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match, the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion to a computer under tournament conditions.

Did Deep Blue demonstrate real artificial intelligence? The opinions are mixed. I like the comments of Drew McDermott  Professor of Computer Science at Yale University:

So, what shall we say about Deep Blue? How about: It’s a “little bit” intelligent. It knows a tremendous amount about an incredibly narrow area. I have no doubt that Deep Blue’s computations differ in detail from a human grandmaster’s; but then, human grandmasters differ from each other in many ways. On the other hand, a log of Deep Blue’s computations is perfectly intelligible to chess masters; they speak the same language, as it were. That’s why the IBM team refused to give game logs to Kasparov during the match; it would be equivalent to bugging the hotel room where he discussed strategy with his seconds. Saying Deep Blue doesn’t really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn’t really fly because it doesn’t flap its wings.

It will be fun to see what the future brings. In the mean time, I like this phrase, which I first saw on a cubicle of a customer in Tennessee, “Intelligence, even if artificial, is preferable to stupidity, no matter how genuine.”