Feng-Hsiung Hsu

Several cognitive scientists said Deep Blue's victory in the opening game of the recent match told more about chess than about intelligence.

"It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent," said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and author of several books about human intelligence, including "Godel, Escher, Bach," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, with its witty argument about the connecting threads of intellect in various fields of expression. "They're just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn't. It doesn't mean Kasparov isn't a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings."

Those who ascribe to the theory that machines are just machines that will always be apprenticed to human masters tend to view the hoopla over the chess match and the worry over the ascension of the machine as, well, "crazy," to use the word of Berkeley's Searle.

"It's just a hunk of junk that somebody's designed," he said of Deep Blue.

Paul Saffo, a technology expert at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, Calif., more or less agreed. "People who fear machines don't need to lose any sleep just yet," he said. "To me, the match was interesting as a cultural event. Chess, whereas it's a difficult problem to solve for computer scientists, is just a constrained formal problem. O.K., a computer beat a grandmaster, but computers aren't any smarter than they were the day before. The question I'd ask, now that this Rubicon has been passed, is What's the new arbitrary measure? Maybe it's a computer that plays go," -- the ancient Japanese board game that has yet to be conquered by a machine -- "or a computer that can fill in an IRS form without getting an audit."

Hofstadter has another idea. He says it is not impossible that a machine might one day learn from experiences and feel things as humans do. But in the meantime, that is still what separates us and them.

In "Godel, Escher, Bach" he held chess-playing to be a creative endeavor with the unrestrained threshold of excellence that pertains to arts like musical composition or literature. Now, he says, the computer gains of the last decade have persuaded him that chess is not as lofty an intellectual endeavor as music and writing; they require a soul.

"I think chess is cerebral and intellectual," he said, "but it doesn't have deep emotional qualities to it, mortality, resignation, joy, all the things that music deals with. I'd put poetry and literature up there, too. If music or literature were created at an artistic level by a computer, I would feel this is a terrible thing."