Hubris Spells Doom for Grandmaster

Sophisticated AI chess programs are continuing to beat the world’s greatest human players, and the humiliated Grandmasters are continuing to gripe & complain. First, Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and just five months ago the current champ was beaten in a one-move checkmate by a new AI program.

"I rechecked this variation many times and analyzed quite far ahead," Kramnik protested. "It seemed to me I was winning."

Indeed. Chess had been long regarded as a game requiring much creativity & ingenuity to excel, something that machines would never dominate. But as Deep Blue and others have shown us, our unabashed confidence was no match for the brute force mapping of all possible outcomes. Eventually, human players adapted their game play to try to throw off the computer programs, but the AI have adapted as well, going so far as to invention previously unknown variations, to maintain their chess supremacy.

How long until other domains previously described as bastions of creativity & consciousness give way to algorithms & AI? Many have spoken about the “God of the Gaps” concept, but what about a Consciousness of the Gaps?