I rented this DVD the other day called "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" about his famous chess match against Deep Blue. I'm not a chess expert, so his argument that a computer could not make the move it did in game two means nothing to me. For all I know about chess (which isn't much) maybe it could have.

But what I do understand, and find very suspicious, is that the IBM team kept Deep Blue locked away in another room for the entire match. Why? What exactly were they hiding?

Having Kasparov and Deep Blue on the same stage together while they played against each other would have been even better publicity for IBM. I'm sure they know that, and that's exactly what they would have done, if they had been running a legitimate contest.

But it wasn't a legitimate contest, in my opinion. I think what they were really hiding in that room was a team of grandmasters who collectively decided what moves should be played, and IBM lied to the world by telling us it had been a computer. Not just a computer, but an IBM computer.

I don't care about Kasparov. If he really did lose that match to a computer, it doesn't bother me one way or the other. But I don't think he did. I think it was all a hoax.

I`m not sure if it was a hoax or not or when this took place but older equipment was very sensitive to outside interference maybe that was why it was in another room?

If this was the case IBM should have said so and had a camera set up to film the machine in operation and also an independent source of respected people to oversea it.

If there's one thing I could take into the wilderness to ensure I could start a fire it would be the friction between a group of chess grand masters trying to determine what the next best move in a chess game should be. Kidding... I've only seen a few chess players lose their cool in tense games...

Did Big Blue win?
That's what I read/heard on the news. Don't know more than that. about the match.

I can say that I once got to see a genuine supercomputer at a NASA facility about eight or ten years ago. Looking through an observation window my impression was that they are computationally impressive but not much to look at.

What I saw was a large but otherwise standard mostly white computer room. A typical raised floor with its distinctive white tiles. And, as I remember it, three rows of four machine blue boxes with very few features. There was one CRT and keyboard at a standard computer work station with a few cables going down into the floor arranged by the door. Each of the big boxes had a couple of blinking lights. Nobody was inside and other than the few blinking LEDs nothing moved or showed any action at all.

For a few hundred dollars you could recreate the scene out of light wood frames, hot glued foam board and paint. A nine volt battery, LED driver IC and a couple of LEDs make the lights.

Kind of like a "Blake's Seven" set. It could have been theatrical props and I wouldn't know the difference.

I doubt you could beat Kasparov with a team of Chess masters. Portions of the game played at grandmaster level have a large component of intuition and gut feeling. This is an aspect that can't be accomplished by a team IMO.

Of course Big Blue plays a different sort of game. It has no intuition or gut feeling. It has no ego and can't be psyched out or intimidated or rattled. It is all brute force computation.

That would have been their advantage. They knew they were playing Kasparov, but Kasparov didn't know who he was playing. It's sort of like a poker game, where the other players can see your face, but you can't see theirs.

Along the same line, did NASA really land on the moon?

I dont' see a conspiracy. I see a big honking rack with a LOT of loud fans. Chess players, like golf players, like it quiet. Deep Blue would have been a hyperventilating heavy breather- gets stuck in another room. The only "conspiracy" is that Deep Blue was made to beat Kasperov, not be a general chess player and that most other grandmasters would probably mop the board with DB.

I'll instead make a counter challenge- name this kabal of grandmasters. Prove that they was there, or at least were not any place else. Then I'll take it seriously.

Yes


I find it hard to believe people think we didn’t land there.

MythBusters just did a show on this 3 or 4 days ago. They ripped apart all the CT arguments.

And we all know everything we see on TV is true... right???