Did Kasparov lose agains a Machine or a Program?

I can clearly report that it was the program that could interpret the power of the pieces, and the 64 squares that won the match.  Now to see some of the others try.

Yes, he famously lost against IBM's Deep Blue 1997.

It was the program and not the machine.  The machine can only do what a programmer wants it to do.  No program--no match.

Did Kasparov lose against a Machine or a Program?

My answer is he lost to both.  Technically, Deep Blue was a combination of hardware (machine) and software (program).

From Wikipedia:  The system derived its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing power.  It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30 nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor, enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. (machine)  Its chess playing program was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system.

It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer according to the TOP500 list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark

Kasparov really psyched himself out by not realizing that as processors improved, over time, they tend to avoid losing positions and go to winning or drawn ones during evaluation for the best move.

If you defeat me in a game of chess then I would say that I lost to you, not your physical body.

The machine knows nothing about chess.

I might be way off because I'm no computer expert but it's possible that it's the machine that can beat a human but the program that can beat other computers.

From what I can tell the basic concepts a chess program uses have been around for a long time, while the program can tweak which it deems a bit more valuable than another I'm guessing that too much emphasis of one over another ends up being counter productive.

So it could be the key variable in the computer evaluation of a position is the end result looking out a number of moves into the future. I would propose that if that foresight is restricted to say every possible line but only 5 moves out (which was probably the case in the early computer days)  the ability for any program to beat a GM is severly restricted. On the other hand, I'm guessing that any decent program today which has virtually unrestricted foresight on a decent machine would be tough to beat by any human. Forget about a top notch prepped computer on the best hardware.

But when I look over computer v computer games it might be that those slight tweaks to the program are the difference for one to bust the other.

Deep Blue was a dedicated chess 'super-computer', designed as a challenge by IBM to beat the world's best human program (which was Kasparov back then).

Deep Blue was a combination of hardware (the machine itself) and software (the program). So, Kasparov lost to both the machine and the program; both of which made up Deep Blue.

However, the technological advancement since then means that your smartphone could annihalate Deep Blue, and any human player for that matter.

Moore's Law says that the processing power of the average computer doubles every 18 months. There have been 11 x 18mth periods since 1997; meaning that computing power has increases 2^11 = 2,048 times in that period.

Today's smartphones are much more powerful than the ones that sent the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon in 1969. That's 30 x 18mth periods, and 1 billion times the processing power.

And this number is set to continue increasing; and at one point in the future, chess will be solved by computers. But that is a long time away, and that will require a much more powerful super-computer and much more sophisticated software.

Computers are getting more powerful, but humans aren't, and it's humans that will be creating these programs. So, is the human mind and its capabilities the limiting factor in us solving chess?

Sorry if this has all been said before, but it's hard to pick out bits of information with people spamming games that were never actually played.

Thanks!

I'm doing computing at college, but I take an interest in these things.

For those that want to know more about this match, then there is a very interesting documentary called "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" that is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBzI7y8VNCA

For anyone who missed this:

Kasparov speaks on the subject of man verses computer (between 42:55 – 48:30) with his usual zeal and enthusiasm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPT0vg_Jl8Q