The above image is of Garry Kasparov playing Deep Blue, the IBM chess machine that was first to beat a World Chess Champion. The human operator shown in the picture is Feng-Hsiung Hsu, the lead architect behind the Deep Blue machine and author of the book I'm now reading, "Behind Deep Blue."
The book is really interesting because it gives the nitty-gritty details about how the Deep Blue machine was built. Like Rome, Deep Blue was not built in a day. (Actually, it took about 10 years of collaborative effort on the part of several Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate students.) It makes me appreciate more the technological progress we humans have made, and understand just how long it's going to be before we reach that plug-and-play nirvana where no one will have to worry about compatability or software bugs or Grandma not being able to maintain her PC.
As for chess, I became interested in playing again a couple weeks ago when I visited our church youth group and thrashed a string of nine-year-old and 10-year-old contenders. (They were having a "Game Night," and I needed to boost my ego after an exhuasting job search.) A few days later, I downloaded a free chess program. I'm still only able to beat the next-to-easiest level regularly and get whooped whenever the program is allowed to look more than three plies (moves) ahead. I've noticed the computer starts to self-destruct and make non-sensical moves in certain instances, such as when its facing a particularly tough but necessary trade.
Also, I interviewed at Nintendo yesterday. Man, I hope I get that job!
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