Agony to ecstasy
In forty years, computer
chess progressed from the lowest depth to the highest peak of human
chess performance. It took a handful of good ideas, culled by trial
and error from a larger number of possibilities, an accumulation of
previously evaluated game openings and endings, good adjustment of
position scores, and especially a ten-millionfold increase in the
number of alternative move sequences the machines can explore. Note
that chess machines reached world champion performance as their
(specialized) processing power reached about 3% of human, on our
brain-to-computer scale. Since it is plausible that Garry Kasparov
(but hardly anyone else) can apply his brainpower to the problems of
chess with an efficiency of 3%, the result supports our retina-based
extrapolation. In coming decades, as general-purpose computer power
grows beyond Deep Blue's specialized strength, machines will
begin to match humans in more common skills.