In July of 1979, a computer program called BKG 9.8—the creation of Hans Berliner, a professor of computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh—played the winner of the world backgammon championship in Monte Carlo. The program was run on a large computer at Carnegie-Mellon that was connected by satellite to a robot in Monte Carlo. The robot, named Gammonoid, had a visual-display backgammon board on its chest, which exhibited its moves and those of its opponent, Luigi Villa, of Italy, who by beating all his human challengers a short while before had won the right to play against Gammonoid. The stakes were five thousand dollars, winner take all, and the computer won, seven games to one. It had been expected to lose. In a recent Scientific American article, Berliner wrote:
Not much was expected of the programmed robot. . . . Although the organizers had made Gammonoid the symbol of the tournament by putting a picture of it on their literature and little robot figures on the trophies, the players knew that existing microprocessors could not give them a good game. Why should the robot be any different?
This view was reinforced at the opening ceremonies in the Summer Sports Palace in Monaco. At one point the overhead lights dimmed, the orchestra began playing the theme of the film “Star Wars,” and a spotlight focused on an opening in the stage curtain through which Gammonoid was supposed to propel itself onto the stage. To my dismay the robot got entangled in the curtain and its appearance was delayed for five minutes.
This was one of the few mistakes the robot made. Backgammon is now the first board or card game with, in effect, a machine world champion. Checkers, chess, go, and the rest will follow—and probably quite soon. But what does this mean for us, for our sense of uniqueness and worth—especially as machines evolve whose output we can less and less distinguish from our own? Some sense of what may be in store is touched on in Berliner’s article:
I could hardly believe this finish, yet the program certainly earned its victory. There was nothing seriously wrong with its play, although it was lucky to have won the third game and the last. The spectators rushed into the closed room where the match had been played. Photographers took pictures, reporters sought interviews, and the assembled experts congratulated me. Only one thing marred the scene. Villa, who only a day earlier had reached the summit of his backgammon career in winning the world title, was disconsolate. I told him that I was sorry it had happened and that we both knew he was really the better player.
My own involvement with computers has been sporadic. I am of a generation that received its scientific education just before the time—the late nineteen-fifties—when the use of computers in scientific work became pervasive. I own and can operate one of the new, programmable pocket calculators. I once took a brief course in FORTRAN programming, and the ten-year-old son of a colleague of mine once gave me an afternoon’s worth of instruction in BASIC programming language, which he uses to operate a typewriter-size computer in his father’s study. But as a theoretical physicist, I have avoided physics problems that have to be run off on large machines. Even so, I have read a great deal over the years about the new computer revolution and the age of the microprocessor: an age in which circuits with thousands of elements can be packed into a computer chip—a silicon wafer—so small that it can be inserted in the eye of a needle; in which the speed of machine operations is measured in billionths of a second; and in which the machines’ limitations resulting from the fact that electromagnetic signals propagate at only the speed of light are beginning to manifest themselves. There are so many books and articles on this subject and its implications that it is hard to distinguish one voice from another. But in all this computer literature I have constantly been delighted by what I have read by Marvin Minsky, who since 1974 has been the Donner Professor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper entitled “Matter, Mind, and Models,” Minsky comments on free will:
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