The Bug Did It!
In May, 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and it made headlines everywhere. Maybe you are thinking: Ok, so computers got very smart or somebody wrote a great chess program, so what? It was bound to happen at some point. Big deal. Except that’s not what had happened. Kasparov blamed the defeat on a single move by the computer. What was so special about that move? Yasser Seirawan described both the move and far more importantly, the impact it had on Kasparov: “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy.” In other words, that one move had messed with Kasparov’s mind . Ironically, that move with such devastating consequence was “the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software” ! Even worse (at least from Kasparov’s perspective), one of the developers of the software said that “the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at ...