It's one of the few cartoons I've seen that inspired a book!

=== begin quoted text ===

This book was inspired by the cover of a Datamation magazine that appeared about 20 years ago. It shows a man in an office with what used to be a desktop computer on the table in front of him. The poor guy has his hands poised over the keyboard, but the rest of the machine is in tiny pieces all over the room. His eyebrows have been burned off, his hair is blown straight back, and his coffee cup has tipped over. There's a huge cloud of black smoke over his head. It is obvious that the computer has exploded about five seconds earlier. He's thinking, "It's never done that before...."

[- from the book "It's Never Done That Before: A Guide to Troubleshooting Windows XP (2006); from the introduction]

=== end quoted text ===

And here it is....

... in color (as it appeared on the Datamation cover):

http://tinyurl.com/its-never-done-t...

... and in greyscale, as I first saw it:

http://tinyurl.com/its-never-done-t...

Best wishes and careful computing to all!

http://www.lawphil.net/judjuris/jur...

http://openjurist.org/999/f2d/497/u...

Kasparov says "Look, it can't even swim! Now it has to learn it! Stupid computer!"

and in the explaning box it says

"After the defeat, Kasparov wanted to test if the computer also was better at other things"

"A few months after all the work I did on the <Deep Blue project>, at the US Championship, I thought <"miserable Earthlings, you have no chance against me!" <>>

-- Joel Benjamin

"In certain situations, <Deep Blue> plays like a God.

-- Kasparov

I just think we should look at this as a chess match between the world's greatest chess player, and Garry Kasparov.

~ Lou Gerstner (IBM Chairman)

<Toward the end of my interview with him, [Murray] Campbell somewhat mischievously referred to an incident that had occurred toward the end of the first game in their 1997 match with Kasparov.

“A bug occurred in the game and it may have made Kasparov misunderstand the capabilities of Deep Blue,” Campbell told me. “He didn’t come up with the theory that the move it played was a bug.”

The bug had arisen on the forty-fourth move of their first game against Kasparov; unable to select a move, the program had defaulted to a last-resort fail-safe in which it picked a play completely at random. The bug had been inconsequential, coming late in the game in a position that had already been lost; Campbell and team repaired it the next day. “We had seen it once before, in a test game played earlier in 1997, and thought that it was fixed,” he told me. “Unfortunately there was one case that we had missed.”

In fact, the bug was anything but unfortunate for Deep Blue: it was likely what allowed the computer to beat Kasparov. In the popular recounting of Kasparov’s match against Deep Blue, it was the second game in which his problems originated—when he had made the almost unprecedented error of forfeiting a position that he could probably have drawn.

But what had inspired Kasparov to commit this mistake? His anxiety over Deep Blue’s forty-fourth move in the first game—the move in which the computer had moved its rook for no apparent purpose. Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence. He had never considered that it was simply a bug.>

Meh.

"Saying <Deep Blue> doesn't really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn't really fly because it doesn't flap its wings. "

The Human vs Machine: AlphaGo (Google DeepMind) vs Lee Sedol match received much press coverage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha...

The ancient game of Go is significant (in part) because, by important metrics, it has a greater game complexity than Chess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_...

Jeff Bezos' remark raises an interesting possibility: what if we were to limit Chess computers by POWER, limiting them (as he suggests) to 50 watts (or whatever the human limit is).

It would be an interesting equalization!

I hope you are all well & in good spirits....

I have previously suggested that perhaps a good way to handicap computers to bring them down to the level of humans is by time handicapping. After all, if the computer's main advantage over humans is their speed and capacity of calculation, then a logical way to make the odds more even is to limit the amount of calculation they can do by giving the human a time handicap.

The issue is then to determine how much of a handicap does the human need to be given in order to equalize the odds. I have suggested an approach that will not require too much human time to determine this handicap, most recently here: Stockfish (Computer) (kibitz #117). But I doubt that there would be much interest in trying it.